The Man That Got Away
by MaggieMerc
Summary: Angie and Peggy have a pleasant vacation all planned out. Too bad they didn't notice all the spies, assassins and one very, very dead, but suddenly very, very alive man were on the itinerary.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

Okay. Look. She's a big fancy actress. She's got awards. Accolades. When she goes to events she's got a fella on her arm. When she does interviews she's intoxicating and alluring.

Officially she's single. Officially the boys are all clamoring at her door. She goes to enough parties and appears in a enough rags that straight girls want to be her and straight boys want to do her.

She is, if this is just between her and the mirror, an **icon**.

So she's not gonna admit this next part to just anyone. Fact is she's not gonna admit it outside of that closed door over there. But the thing is, if Angie Martinelli is gonna have to choose, if it's between being out **there** and sitting in a bed half-naked with a script in her lap and her girlfriend beside her with work files in her lap and the only contact between them is their feet. If she's gonna have to **choose**—well than she'd choose lazy footsie and work reading on a Sunday morning with her gal every damn day of the week.

There's nothing so special about it, she supposes. At least in the grand scheme of stuff. It's all painfully ordinary. The reading material's different but Angie's pretty sure her brother does the same thing with his wife before they hustle the whole family off to church.

But that's gotta be part of the appeal right? The gooey domesticity of it.

Bet Cap never got his lazy Sundays with her—

There's a rush of fluttering paper and she sees Peggy's files fly through the air before she's being tackled back into the mattress by a long warm body. Peggy looms over her and stares down thoughtfully. "You're thinking too much."

"Am not?"

She rolls her eyes and kisses Angie's forehead. "Are too."

She drops onto Angie, but she's careful not to smother. Really she's more a blanket that smells like heaven. Angie wraps her arms around her neck and kisses her cheek.

"Thinking 'bout you."

That gets a dramatic groan and Peggy buries her face in Angie's shoulder. "That's awful," she says—voice still muffled.

First meeting Peggy Angie thought she was all this tightly wound grace and sophistication. Nearly ten years later, three of which have been spent practically attached at the hip, she knows that Peggy is only sporadically graceful and rarely, if ever, sophisticated.

She pokes Peggy's side and goes into a real sappy rendition of her big love confession from her last picture. The one that was so bad Peggy got the giggles in the audience and had to leave.

"I love you like sun on the grass and wind in the leaves and tomorrows that can never die!"

This time Peggy just keeps groaning and laughing before rolling off of Angie so she can cover her ears. "That's wretched," she cries.

Angie, dating a fighter, knows how she's not supposed to give 'em an inch when they back down. So she quickly straddles Peggy and pries her hands off from around her ears.

Peggy stops laughing.

But mainly because Angie's leaning down to kiss her. It's the real long and languid kind that she knows Peggy goes crazy for. The kind that get her mewling.

God the mewling. It's so silly. So ridiculous. And Angie knows no one, not ever, got to or will get to here it but her.

But instead, today, Peggy starts laughing again. Little guffaws against Angie's lips. "Tomorrows that can never die," she snickers.

####

"Don't look now, but I think the boss man's about to blow his face off."

Angie is, naturally, alarmed by the statement. Both because her girlfriend is currently standing beside Howard Stark and peering into the same tail end of a jet engine and because she's not really used to Stark's employees talking to her.

It must be the clothes. She's just come from a meeting about shooting a Captain America sequel with a whole new director and a whole new angle and a whole new bunk and she thinks it's an awful idea but the studio said she had to take the meeting or they'd have her ass for contract violation (she's been too choosy lately according to them). So she's dressed down from her usual fresh off the runway wardrobe. In fact she's pretty sure her skirt is out of one of Peggy's Talbot's catalogues.

There's also her hair. She's been experimenting with darkening it. (That's a lie. Really she's experimenting with **not** coloring it for the first time since 1943.)

She must not look like herself or otherwise the woman in the coveralls next to her wouldn't be making that kind of crack under her breath.

People just don't talk to Angela Carter that way.

Not tall gangly kids that have to just barely be out of school.

It's a refreshing chance of pace. She crosses her arms and dramatically appraises the proceedings. Peggy's got her serious work face on as Howard tries to sell her on whatever the hell it is. "We talking Howard Hughes face skating across Beverly Hills or a drunk working at a munitions factory?"

The woman watches Howard reach into the engine and break something off. "Definitely the former. And **technically** only when he takes it for a spin. His girlfriend should be okay if she stays on the ground."

"You won't if you keep calling her his girlfriend." The girl blushes and Angie grins. "She's always said that's right up there with calling her a Nazi."

The glower that darkens the girl's face tells Angie that maybe she's one of those folks that you don't make Nazi jokes around.

That's the problem with canoodling with too many spies and soldiers. That lot makes jokes so dark you need a flashlight to find your way out.

"So why's he gonna finally scorch the mustache," she asks. Better to distract than apologize.

The girl goes into explaining a lot of very smart sounding technical stuff that Angie has only the barest grasp of—conceptually. The gist seems to just be fiery death.

She finally has to hold up her hands. "So I think you've officially shot past my understanding of things."

The girl frowns, "Aren't you…?"

"I mean, give me a carburetor and I can rebuild it with my eyes closed, but the planes and trains and all that are strictly Stark's affair."

"You're not…" The girl's got a real open and honest and innocent kind of face. So the frown makes her look young. Real young. "You're not his assistant are you?"

Angie's honestly surprised anyone would think Howard would hire a personal assistant with a nuanced grasp of aeronautical engineering. Usually the requirements involved waist to chest ratio. "Definitely not."

The girl blushes furiously. "I'm so—geez I'm so sorry. I just though—how you're dressed! And you seemed interested in what they're doing and—"

"I'm here for her," she nods at Peggy's backside, which is looking excellent in that skirt. "What about you? You build the planes?"

"Cars actually. Well car suspensions." She runs her hand through her hair, leaving a streak of grease on her forehead. "I'm an engineer—" she hisses, "apprentice. I'm an **apprentice** engineer."

Angie glances around the hanger before leaning in and saying conspiratorially, "I don't see any cars."

There she goes again. Blushing like she's just met a boy.

"You're not supposed to be in here are you?"

"I have clearance," she says weakly.

Angie's pretty sure clearance isn't the same thing as "supposed to be," but she's also pretty sure that if she keeps razzing the girl the kid will explode all over the hanger floor.

Across from them Peggy climbs into the plane and starts fiddling with switches and acting like she knows how to fly it. Judging from the look Howard gives her Angie's not the only one who knows Peggy couldn't fly her way out of a paper bag.

Which is…perfectly acceptable. She can kill a man with a spoon, triage a chest full of shrapnel and successfully talk down a fella who can turn himself into fire. She's very capable.

"Out of everyone here I'm probably the only one that doesn't have clearance," Angie tells the girl. "So car suspension huh?"

"Sure. I mean, the Hotchkiss drive has banana great suspension—"

"Big fan."

"But I'm working on something fully independent."

Angie gets what the girl's talking about only a little bit more than when she was talking about planes, but, comparatively speaking, it's a helluva lot more.

So they go to a smaller hanger and Angie squats down under a car on a lift and gets lectured for twenty minutes on independent suspension.

Then the kid, whose name Angie still doesn't know, notices the way Angie's eyes keep wandering over to the engine.

**That's** something she can get into and so, apparently, can the kid, because before she knows it Peggy's hands are digging into the stiff muscles of her shoulders and she's leaning down so Angie can get a stellar whiff of her perfume.

"Having fun," Peggy asks.

Angie catches the way she stops herself from kissing her cheek.

She reaches up to cover one of Peggy's hands with her own. "You know it."

She and the kid have dismantled something Howard wouldn't want dismantled and are sitting at a workbench trying to put it back together.

The kid blushes again and Angie supposes she and Peggy might look more friendly than most friends who happen to be ladies.

Peggy does too, but she's more smooth about it. Keeps her hands on Angie but looks over at the girl—face that mask that can be cool or kind depending all on the weather. "I hope my colleague didn't distract from your work."

Colleague.

That's a new one. Her brother will get a real kick out of that one.

The girl takes it all in stride. "Oh heavens no. Honestly I was just happy to have someone to chat with!" She's so damn nice she makes Angie's teeth hurt.

"Boys down here can be a little," Angie shoves two fingers up in the air rudely.

"Ah," Peggy says succinctly.

They all chat a little more and Peggy pretends to be interested in the project that she's clearly not interested in and then it really is time to go because they're having dinner with the kids across town and are gonna be late if they're not careful.

Then this kid, this nice wholesome kid who sounds like she fell out off a train straight out of Chicago, calls out, "I didn't catch your name."

Angie, having not run into that issue in…ages can only blink and stare.

Peggy laughs and tries to immediately cover it up which results in an unladylike snort.

"Angela Carter," Angie says

And the girl smiles happily, "Maria Carbonell."

####

"I really don't think she knew who you were." Peggy's gone conciliatory.

"But how could she not! There's a giant honking picture of me outside the gates."

It's huge. Large enough that if it were photorealistic Angie could probably crawl into her own damn pores.

Peggy leans forward in her seat to look at the billboard. "They got the lips all wrong."

"You're such a wiseass."

Peggy feigns surprise and Angie hangs a right.

One of the best parts about work trips to LA is she gets to drive. She gets to drive in DC too, but LA's **made** for driving. The roads all have more lanes than cars and the weather's so nice she can leave the top down. Just let the wind tangle her hair and flutter the pages of scripts she leaves in the back seat.

"If it helps the girl did seem a little—" Peggy never ever ever denigrates other women if she can help it. Angie loves that about her.

"Ditzy?" Angie also does not have the same noble streak.

"Distracted," Peggy corrects. "Like she's got too many ideas."

"Wonder if all of Howard's hires are like that."

Peggy laughs. "God, can you imagine the staff meetings?"

They both shudder.

She pulls onto Mulholland and gets a little heavy on the gas. The drone of the engine fills the whole car.

"How was your meeting," Peggy shouts over it.

"Lousy," she shouts back.

"Lousy you mucked it up and have to do it or lousy you mucked it up and don't have to."

"Don't have to!"

The grin she gets is worth the set up.

She lets off the gas just a little. Enough so they won't go hoarse just trying to have a conversation. "And I was thinking since I don't have to sell my soul doing jingoistic American propaganda—"

"Careful. HUAC could have the car bugged."

"I'm being serious English. I was thinking—"

Peggy shoots her one of her inscrutable looks.

"This might be the time to take the Milan offer."

The "Milan offer" as it is discussed in their home, is the offer for Angie to do a four week engagement at a club in Milan with the understanding that Peggy and the kids would be there for at least half of it and they'd use the Lake Como house as their family's base of operations.

Peggy has been…less that excited about this opportunity. The "Italy Incident" (everything regarding the country seems to be stuck with quotation marks now) is never openly discussed, but even after three years it has her edgy about them going back. It's been sort of sweet. Up to a point.

Peggy doesn't say no.

And she doesn't say yes.

And Angie lays back on the gas.

And the engine drones.

And the only reason she doesn't get real mad is because when they're stopped at a light she looks over and Peggy's all glowing in the red of it and looking like some kind of painting that makes you just start tearing up right there in the museum.

So she takes one hand off the wheel and holds it out and Peggy's fingers lace between her own and neither of them says a word until they're at the valet stand.

####

The next day they're on the plane and Peggy leans across the arm rest and says she's sorry. Says she's got to stop being a worry wart.

Angie chooses not to remind her that it really is unnecessary. At least where Italy is concerned. While they haven't been **together** they've both been back to Italy half a dozen times since then.

She gets why Peggy can be silly about it though. Watching someone get kidnapped is never easy—even if the person doesn't remember it. "In fact it could be good," Peggy still talking. "A bit of a reclamation if you will."

Angie smirks. "You just want to reclaim my bed," she says in a voice low enough that others can't hear.

Peggy leans in closer. "Sure we should bring the kids?" Eyebrow raised coy enough that she could be an actress herself. Maybe Joan. She used to be able to sell a line like that.

"Maybe they can come over later." Angie's real smooth.

Peggy just nods. "Sure."

"A lot later."

"You're insatiable."

"After every damn surface in the house is reclaimed."

####

The problem with everything coming up Angie is that eventually everything's gonna come down on Angie. Living with a spy she really ought to be more pessimistic. She ought to **expect** the bad stuff. See it coming before it hits her in the nose.

But she doesn't.

Peggy says her optimism is one of the things she loves about her. "You see good in everyone," she always says.

"Except Dottie," Angie always says back.

"Except Dottie."

Peggy loves it so Angie tries to love her optimism too. Tries to embrace.

Until they're coming back home after six weeks in LA and the house doesn't have that stale and unlived in smell it ought to have. It smells like toast and coffee and Peggy sends the kids back out to the car and pulls a gun out of her purse and Angie goes with her because she shouldn't but she **has** to and her hand is a ghost on the small of Peggy's back and all she can see is the broad stretch of Peggy's shoulders as they move efficiently through the house quiet and in tandem like they've practiced (they haven't).

There's a sixteen year old girl sitting in their kitchen stuffing her face with marmalade and toast and she's got a gun too. It's just casually sitting on the counter.

But she doesn't reach for it when the two of them come into the room.

She doesn't even swallow. Keeps chewing.

Her eyes get bright like she's happy to see Angie. Then she's nodding at Peggy. One of those soldier to soldier sort of nods the Commandos do.

Three years and Natalie hasn't aged a day.

Peggy's gun is aimed at her and it's steady as that big rock in Spain.

That's when Natalie swallows. Then washes her toast and marmalade down with some coffee.

"Good, you're finally home."

"What do you want," Peggy asks, growling like the dog the kids have been begging for.

"Help. We have a problem."

"Coming in from the cold are you?"

She grins, "Not on your life Carter. But someone's about to make it a lot chillier."

Peggy bristles.

But it's Angie that asks, "The Soldier?" Saying the name leaves her all conflicted. Makes her feel funny. She wishes she could remember the fella. Wishes Peggy didn't tense up when Angie said his name.

Natalie shakes her head.

"Worse. His old bosses."

Peggy spits the word out like a curse.

"HYDRA."


	2. Chapter 2

The kids are beyond excited to have Natalie in the house. She's younger than their parents, but older than the two of them. "She a kid, but **mature,**" they say with the kind of righteous insistence only eight year olds can manage.

Natalie is at first deeply flustered by having two kids who aren't even ten follow her around like she was in the Davey Crockett movie.

But then, then one day she's actually okay with it. One of them says something to her and the other one kicks his shin and tells him to be quiet and Angie catches Natalie smiling fondly and she has to hide her own smile and then call and tell Peggy what happened.

"Marvelous," she says dryly.

That night, their last in the US for the next few weeks, they're both in the bathroom and the bathtub is running and Peggy's removing her make up at the vanity and Angie's checking the water temperature by dragging her hand along the surface of the water and they're warily circling the issue of what happened after dinner when Natalie taught the children how to drop down from the ceiling to attack Peggy.

"I think it's a good thing," Angie finally says.

"Of course it is. The little assassin child likes our children enough to share techniques."

"It was funny."

"They shouted 'death to the capitalist pigs' Angie."

She snorts. "If someone attacks they'll be prepared?"

Peggy glares. But the hard lines around her mouth softens and she ducks her head.

Angie stands up. Comes over and wraps wet hands around her and buries her face in Peggy's neck. "These capitalist pigs are so soft and squishy with these "emotions" are they not comrade," she asks in a bad Russian accent.

Peggy's hand comes up to clasp her arm. She pulls one of Angie's hand away so she can kiss her palm then quickly uses her sudden leverage like the fink she is to pull Angie into her lap.

There's that easiness again. That's enough to make Angie hyperventilate if she thinks about it too much. Peggy nuzzling her nose and kissing her softly and smiling and it's all so quiet and intimate that she doesn't want it to stop.

"The 'comrade' you grounded to the guest room better stop with the indoctrination of eight year olds or I'm gonna wear her ass like a shoe."

Angie's arms are now around Peggy's neck and she flexes. "You really know how to maintain the mood capitalist pig."

"Is that—" Her lips press to that spot behind Angie's ear "—a—" and then drag down to that one where her shoulders meet her neck "fact?" She nips and Angie squeals and slides out of her lap and onto the floor.

Peggy's quick to follow. Straddling Angie and slipping her warm hand under Angie's robe. Gasping when Angie flexes one thigh against her.

They forget about the running bathtub and the sleeping kids and the brooding child assassin down the hall and sink into one another with soft sighs and quiet giggles.

At least until the bath threatens to overflow and Peggy's mouth never leaves Angie's breast even as she blindly reaches up to turn the faucet off.

When they finally make it to the bath the water's ice cold.

####

Their flight out, on a SHIELD cargo plane, is at ten. Peggy's already packed and has her trunk in the car and is in the study on the phone back to work.

Angie is…half-packed.

If she and Peggy ever robbed a bank Peggy'd plan it to the T and Angie would just sit in the car and wait to improvise the getaway. Then Peggy's affectionately tell her she's an idiot and maybe they'd make out on the hood of the car afterwards.

She stops packing.

They should definitely rob a bank.

But not right now.

She slaps her cheeks to focus and goes back to the closet and pulls out four different dresses.

It isn't fair. Peggy's got an advantage. She just has to pack for going on spy missions and battling HYDRA. Angie's got to pack for **watching** her go on spy missions and battling HYDRA and for doing a four week engagement at one of the biggest clubs in Milan.

That's a couple more outfits.

And a helluva lot more rhinestones.

She finally gets it all in order and resolves to just pick up more dresses when she gets to Italy and she's dragging her trunk to the stairs when she notices the man standing at the foot of them.

Daniel looks…good. Or great.

Definitely distinguished. He's grown a mustache now that he doesn't have to worry about Peggy wrinkling her nose and raising a mocking eyebrow at him when he tries to kiss her. And there's more gray around the temple.

The fact that he doesn't scowl at Angie every time he sees her now also helps with the whole "distinguished" look.

"How'd the packing go," he asks with a kind smile.

"She'll lie, but Peggy's definitely taking more than me."

"It's all the shotguns and harpoon guns. Take up a lot of room."

"More than a rhinestone dress anyhow."

He doesn't offer to help her as she manhandles her trunk down the stairs.

The guy is really good in a lot of ways. He's got a good idea of what her and Peggy are but he doesn't sneer at them or make comments or turn them into McCarthy for being "perverts."

She and Peggy never talk about his remarkable tolerance and it'd be a cold day in hell before she ever asked Daniel about it. They're friendly and that's enough.

Just not **too** friendly.

He looked awfully pleased that Christmas the kids tackled her and one of 'em got her right in the shin. Sort of like he's looking now that she's halfway down the stairs.

He's not **mean** per se. He just takes petty pleasure in her more mundane misfortunes.

But the big stuff… When her niece gets polio and lost the use of her arm he heard about it and took a seat in the swing next to the one Angie's sulking in in the backyard and told her it'd get better.

He cares.

As much as any fella can when their wife leaves them for another woman.

"You got that," he asks about the trunk. She's nearly to the bottom and her face is bright red and she's not really sure what a hernia is but thinks she might have one.

"Yeah," she grunts.

Natalie saunters out of the kitchen eating an apple. She sees Daniel at the foot of the stairs and sees Angie struggling with her trunk and takes a bite of her apple and turns around.

"Babysitter?"

"My niece," she lies.

She's pretty sure Daniel's tolerance for her would take a beating if he knew a child assassin from Russia was sharing a house with his kids.

When she's on the last step Daniel takes the trunk from her and sets it down with next to no effort. "Is she just in town or—"

"I'm taking her to Italy with us. Birthday treat."

"Some aunt."

"I do what a can."

They work together to take the trunk out to the car. "Your niece maybe why my kids were playing 'Rise of the Proletariat' in the front yard."

Angie very nearly drops her end of the trunk on her toe while internally cursing Natalie to the day she dies.

"She's a joker," she laughs. Her voice high and impossibly fake. "Regular Ernie Kovac."

"Reminds me a lot of Peg's old friend. What was her name? Dottie?"

"Daniel..."

"I was ready to read Peggy the riot act for bringing her work home, but the kids say she's **your** friend." He sets his half of the trunk down and tips the other towards him so he can lean against it. It makes him look like the "incredible" investigator Peggy's claimed her is. "So tell me Angie, is there a reason I shouldn't have HUAC on the phone right now?"

She stutters.

Daniel glares.

She wonders if this is the moment the whole gig is up.

"Because the girl helped me rescue her in 52."

Peggy Carter has impeccable timing.

Daniel Sousa's got to be something else because instead of flipping his lid at the admission of spies living in his old house he just sets his jaw and raises his chin. He looks past Angie at his ex. "She why you're going to Italy too?"

"You know that's classified."

Now his eyes are narrowed and he doesn't look so nice. "I just need to know what I tell the kids if you decide to disappear again."

"That won't happen."

Daniel laughs. Shakes his head. A lock of hair falls free from where he's combed it back and is in his eyes. It makes him look dashing enough to be in the pictures. "One of these days Peggy. One of these days you're gonna learn to stop making promises you can't keep."

####

Angie thought what Daniel said was maybe a little lousy, but, in fact, it's so lousy that Peggy broods like a Bronte antihero in the back of the plane for half the trip across the Atlantic.

"Which of us is she mad at," Natalie asks out the side of her mouth.

"Her ex-husband."

Natalie studies Peggy's silhouette a moment before nodding and leaning back in her seat and closing her eyes. "Just as long as it isn't me."

She slugs the kid in the arm. That just makes Natalie smile indulgently as she pretends to sleep.

Angie gets up and resettles herself next to Peggy. They don't touch. At SHIELD Peggy's…proclivities are a secret. As far as anyone is concerned Peggy and Angie are just good friends. **Best** friends. And Angie's moved into Peggy's home to help with the kids.

She even keeps a separate bedroom. Just in case.

"All right Heathcliff, you gotta know Daniel was just being a butt this morning."

Peggy scoffs. "Of course I do."

"So what's with the antisocial routine?"

"I'm **thinking**."

Angie raises an eyebrow.

Peggy rolls her eyes. "And not even about what Daniel said."

"It was a low blow."

"Very much below the belt." She sighs and leans back.

"So what?" Angie lowers her voice. Leans over so Peggy has to look at her. "Your mission?"

Peggy's set her jaw. "I just find it deeply disturbing that Leviathan's scared enough to work with us rather than against us."

"Leviathan? Peggy, Natalie is here on her own."

"No, she isn't." She glances at Natalie over the top of her head. Just out of the corner of her eye. "A creature like that doesn't do anything without her masters' permission."

"She helped save me didn't she?"

"A decision she was likely punished for."

Natalie doesn't act any different. Doesn't look any different either. There are no scars or bruises.

Angie looks down at her own hands. At wrists unmarred. She's got no scars either.

Peggy's shaking her head. "No, the only reason that girl's here is because Leviathan is worried and if they're worried…" she gets as close as she can to a shudder.

Angie then has the urge to do something that's kind of on the cusp of being inappropriate in public. And she does it. Reaching over and lacing her fingers with Peggy's.

"You kicked HYDRA's butt clear across Europe. More than once. If they're really back then you'll do it again."

"And again and again," Peggy sighs. Then she laughs and it sounds awfully bitter and defeated for her. "I suppose I was just looking forward to going to Europe and **not** battling an evil occult-oriented spy organization out to rule the world."

"Next time English."

She murmurs an agreement and lays her head on top of Angie's and they fall asleep and if anyone asks they're just friends.

Really good friends.

####

When they arrive in Italy Peggy and Natalie hit the ground running. They're immediately busy traveling to and fro doing all that spy craft stuff they're great at and Angie doesn't really understand.

Thankfully she's too busy herself to feel jealous or frustrated or anything. Kicking off a four-week engagement at a world class club is **hard**. There's planning the set and teaching the dancers and threatening to stab the club owner if he doesn't stop trying to come into her dressing room unannounced.

Peggy, being busy trying to seek out the remnants of HYDRA, misses Angie's opening night and she's okay with it. Even after all the hard work she put into making it a success. When Peggy climbs into bed two hours after Angie she kisses her with cold lips and snuggles up against her and says "sorry," and Angie's okay because she knows she is.

Saving the world kind of takes priority.

Which is why she's honestly surprised when she sees Peggy standing at the bar on night number four. She toasts her with what looks like a bourbon and smiles all through Angie's show and Angie is so delighted Peggy made it that she grins up there on stage too.

Afterwards the club owner comes backstage and tells her she was great. "You were really glowing tonight" he croons and Angie just murmurs something about it being "a good night."

A very good night.

Peggy's hiding behind the door when Angie walks into her dressing room and has her dress half undone and her mouth on the back of her neck before the door's half closed.

"You were tremendous," she says, her hands doing wicked, wicked things that have Angie sighing and reaching for purchase.

She pushes back with her shoulders and feels Peggy fall against the door. The hand that's been climbing up her leg and the other on her breast slacken just enough that Angie can turn around and hold Peggy by the hip and return all those wicked favors.

"Thought you two were headed south tonight?"

She's got part of the top Peggy's dress pulled away and Peggy's heaving against her mouth. "Didn't need to," she pants. "Besides, couldn't miss the show—" she moans, "again."

She grabs Angie by the chin and pulls her into another kiss. All messy and happy and—

There's a banging on the door.

They both stop. They can't stop panting. They're too keyed up to just go **completely** still. But they stop making out like they're in high school.

Only Peggy's a little tenser. The lines in her shoulder and the planes of muscle along her back are a little more rigid. Even the hand that's snaked into Angie's hair is taut.

"Miss Carter? They apparently need you out on the main floor?"

It's just a stage hand and Peggy and Angie both sigh Angie lays her head against Peggy's chest and lets her soothe her with fingers coming through her hair and lips pressed to the top of her head.

At least Peggy thinks she's soothing her. Angie's pretty sure she's the one doing all the soothing and she runs her hands up and down Peggy's back and until she feels her relax—just a fraction.

"We should probably save all the wrecking for the bedroom back at the villa huh?"

"I really wanted to wreck your dressing room." She nudges Angie with her hip, "Particularly that mirror with the good light there."

Angie has to groan, because her imagination has her thinking of all kinds of wonderful things. "What about tomorrow night? Or the night after?"

"Whenever I'm here next?"

She nods, "I'll just pretend I'm sick after the show. Then we'll lock the door and rename this place Dresden."

Peggy thinks that's a very good idea because she gives her one of those searing sort of kisses with all the promise and says "I love you."

Then they help each other look presentable again and while Angie changes into a new pair of stockings that aren't ripped Peggy reapplies her makeup perfectly in the mirror and Angie thinks about kissing it right off of her again.

When Peggy reaches out to open the door Angie catches her arm, "Are you sticking around?"

"Sure? I mean, if that's all right?" Peggy actually looks nervous.

"Yeah! Yeah, I just didn't know with work—and I've got to stay near to closing. Part of the gig is being seen by folks after I'm done with the song and dance routine."

"I'll just get soused at the bar while I wait then?"

There's a peck on the lips just before they walk out together and it feels an awful lot like a bizarre joke on Father Knows Best. All that's missing is one of them carrying a briefcase and the other wearing an outdated pair of pearls.

Peggy goes up to the bar and quickly becomes the life of her own private party, flirting and being coy and even going out on the dance floor.

But she never tries to outshine Angie. Even though Angie's got no doubt she could do it in a heartbeat and without even thinking if she wanted to.

This club, this group of people though. They're here to see Angela Carter. They're here to rub elbows and drop names and be fascinated by an icon.

And when Angie wants to she can put on the iconic charm like nobody's business.

She goes a few times around the dance floor with cocky business magnates and famous actors and at least one count.

It's the count she's just done dancing with and she's a little breathless because he wanted to show off how good he was and she had to show him she's still better.

Some of her hair's come out of her pristine coif and she's pushing it back into place when she runs into just a whole **wall** of good looking fella.

His voice is rich and pleasant and he smells nice, but not perfume nice. Just all natural him sort of nice.

"Mind if I have this dance," he asks.

So he's a nice smelling wall of American beef apparently. She can work with that. She can work with that real—

Her brain short circuits after she takes his hand and looks up into a pair of clever blue eyes.

Because Angie only ever saw the guy once, and he was on stage and she was in the crowd. But once is all you need to know a fella like him. One look and he's just gonna sear on into your memories.

And he's standing there with her hand in his and smiling politely and maybe a little nervously too.

And this guy, this guy holding Angie's hand and asking her to dance.

Is positively, absolutely, with out a doubt.

Captain freaking America.

"Sure."


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Note:** I know. Things are deeply deeply confusing right now. But I promise questions are gonna be answered and the Cartinelli is gonna be full blast and Peggy's gonna be a BAMF.

But first…because there's so much Cartinelli/Steggy crossover here's a dude who knocked out Hitler a few times.

####

She didn't know who he was.

It wasn't her forgetting the last few years and thinking she was seeing him for the first time in seventy years and it wasn't just forgetting the last few days.

No, when Peggy saw him she smiled serenely and said "did you get lost soldier?"

He thought she was joking until they started talking and he realized she wasn't.

The nurses won't tell him much. "We're not really allowed to," they say bashfully.

All he knows is she's getting worse and all he can do is watch it happen. It's like seeing Bucky flung out of the train, only it's taking years instead of seconds.

"Earth to soldier boy. Come in soldier boy."

Nat's wry voice snaps Steve back to attention and he glances up. The ride on the quinjet is bumpy in this storm so she's holding onto a strap hanging from the ceiling and sort of hovering over him, rocking with the ship. "You all right," she asks. She's genuinely concerned, which is a major rarity for her.

He nods and reaches for his helmet. "Just peachy."

"Good, because I've got one basket case already. Don't need another."

The other basket case is Tony Stark. He's sitting all by himself at the far end of the quinjet and staring off into space. It's the quietest Steve's ever seen the guy and he kind of likes it.

A quiet Stark is maybe the nicest Stark he's ever met.

"What's wrong with him anyways? His girlfriend lock him out of the Tower again?"

"Pepper's got nothing to do with this one. Maybe play nice?"

"I can play nice."

She shakes her head, "Pull my other one Rogers."

"I can," he protests.

She nods, "With soldiers and spies. Rich boys in homemade super armor…"

"The fact that he has friends like Rhodes and Potts is the only reason I don't boot him out of the back of the jet," he grumbles.

Sam slides into the seat next to him, smoothly avoiding hitting his wings against the wall of the jet. He's chewing gum that smells like spearmint. He pops a bubble in Steve's face and Steve has to duck his head so Nat will miss the grin that she'll want to tease him about later.

"Rogers talking trash about Iron Wang again?"

Natalie closes her eyes, "Don't encourage him."

He holds his hands up, pops his gum again. "What?"

"Stark can be an ass, but his heart's in the right place." She's actually looking at Stark fondly.

Sam elbows Steve and winks at him. "You know from experience Romanoff?"

Now she's rolling her eyes, "Get your asses up boys. We got a mission." Still putting most of her weight on the strap over head Nat leans back, "Hey Stark! We're briefing now!"

Stark grabs his helmet off the bench beside him and stalks over, his boots beatings a metallic beat against the deck.

Nat motions all three of them over to a giant screen bolted to one wall. The quinjet is technically Stark/Avengers property, "reacquired" by Stark after SHIELD folded.

Both Nat and her friend Maria Hill have claimed to know nothing about that acquisition.

And this little get together Steve's stuck in is also all Avengers mission. Even if it feels like a SHIELD op. Nat's put it together with intel from resources he **knows** shouldn't exist after the Triskelion and she gives them the background on this Viper they're going after in military lingo until Stark raises his hand and says "I understood exactly zero percent of what you just said."

"Viper," she sighs and he can see the quick shift in her head as she moves from military to civie speak, "she's an old school terrorist that's been linked to HYDRA, Ten Rings and half a dozen other organizations that are better off ash. And she's currently doing something very nasty with DAFNE."

Steve asks, "That cartoon lady with the dog?"

"The Italian hadron collider," Stark snaps.

"It was a joke Stark."

"Nice to see it's as outdated as your style Cap."

"We don't know what she's doing," Nat ignores them, "but it seems to involve this very shiny stone."

She plays a video of a stone that seems to disappear and reappear while the camera's on it.

"That can't be good," Sam mutters.

"It looks sort of like the one in Loki's stick," Stark says.

"She nabbed it from a former SHIELD facility a week ago. We never really learned **what** it could do—"

"But she's got ideas right," Stark asks.

Nat nods. "And you do too don't you?"

He shrugs.

"Which is why you're headed to the control room to figure out what she's panning."

"Easy."

"Steve—"

He snaps his helmet into place, "Shut down the power to this thing."

"Keep Stark company. Sam and I will deal with the power."

"Uh no offense comrade, but I think I can handle this Viper all on my own."

"Not with the deck she's stacked. Two and two and if you run into her ringer call for support."

Steve is checking the straps on his gauntlets. Making sure they're good and tight. "Ringer that bad?"

The look Nat's got on her face is all Steve needs to see. "Okay. Stark and I together. You and Sam get the power."

Stark looks less than thrilled by the plan and his level excitement drops even further when Sam pats him on the back. "This could be fun Stark. Maybe you and Steve can finally bond."

"Not a chance," they both grumble.

It's maybe the most embarrassing thing to happen to Steve since he slept for seventy years.

"Have fun," Sam says with a wink.

####

And as battles go it **is** fun for a while. Stark may be an ass out of the suit but when he's in a fight he can be focused and even easy to work with.

They're not quite the team Steve is with Sam or Nat, but they work well, blasting their way through the facility.

Then they run into a soldier. Just one soldier. All that's standing between them and Viper's big glowing definitely not good set up.

He can't see the soldier's face. It's hidden behind a scarf they've wrapped around their head. One that, in the right light, looks like a grinning skull.

"In my day the skull thing wasn't just tacky symbolism," he says. "They really committed to the motif."

"In my day you didn't suit up with half of Cabela's strapped to your back," Stark observes.

And he's right. Even if Steve has no idea what Cabela's is. He can guess judging from the fact that the soldier—clearly Viper's ringer—is currently armed with three guns, a bow, a knife, and not one, but **two** machetes.

It's the machetes they draw as they stalk towards them, an eery confidence in their every step that reminds Steve too much of a brainwashed Bucky..

"Aw, he chose," Stark says, "You got this Cap?"

He cracks his neck.

He does. "Find that stone."

Stark makes to fly away but this soldier, this ringer, is **fast** and nails Stark with an electrified bolo that sends him off balance and careening into the wall. Chunks of cement raining down on him.

Then the ringer's launching themselves at Steve. Their eyes are hidden behind a pair of dark goggles and that makes it harder to fight up close. Harder to anticipate the blows that come almost as quickly as a super soldier's.

Swing after swing of the machetes is only barely blocked by Steve's shield.

And then soon—soon it's like the soldier can **anticipate** Steve's moves and he's only avoiding the edge of those machetes by being very fast and very strong and very experienced.

It's almost as embarrassing as what happened with Stark on the quinjet.

Losing to a mere with Tony Stark just a few feet away would have to be the biggest gaff Steve's ever blundered through.

Thankfully a repulsor goes off and the ringer leaps back, barely avoiding the blasts from Stark's gauntlets.

They come in quick succession and the ringer does a good job avoiding them, until they get the bright idea to actually block one with those machetes cross in front of their chest. The force of the blast is so intense it sends them back into a wall that they hit with the kind of smack that isn't easy to walk off.

Steve rushes over and helps Stark disentangle himself from the bolo. "Thanks for that."

Stark shrugs. "No problem. Kind of impressed to see that one in the flesh."

Steve's a little out of breath and puts his hands on his hips to keep from wheezing. "You know them?"

"Just from the SHIELD database. 'Taskmaster.' Photographic reflexes."

Steve blinks, "Okay…"

"Yeah I didn't get it either, but the guy was going toe to toe with you so it must be something about being fast."

He glances over at the unconscious mercenary. "Real fast."

"This Viper's gotta have a lot of cash to hire Taskmaster. Guy doesn't come cheap."

"You're thinking someone else is backing her?"

"Could be."

They reach the control room—which is blocked by a big door that's firmly locked. "Or she's tapping into funds that weren't always hers to begin with."

"Like whose," Stark asks.

Steve uses his shield to slam through the door. Viper's standing over that yellow stone, that's now glowing nearly as brightly as the sun and she looks very, very familiar.

"Like HYDRA's."

She grins, "Hello Captain."

It's reflex that has Steve throwing his shield at her, but as fast as it is (and it's incredibly fast) Viper—or Madame Hydra as he knew her once upon a time—is just a little quicker this once.

She does something to the stone and the entire room glows yellow and then she's gone and his shield is embedded in the wall behind where she used to be.

"Stark—"

But Stark's already on it. Jetting to where she was standing. His faceplate lifts away to give him an unfiltered view of her setup and he starts muttering to himself as he quickly sorts through it all.

It's the kind of super genius stuff his dad was capable of doing too. But Peggy was always there to snap him out of it if he spiraled too deep.

All Steve can do is pry his shield out of the wall and check in with Sam and Nat on the com.

"Any luck," he asks.

He can hear the pat pat pat of gunfire. "Looks like she sent her entire crew down here to guard the power," Sam shouts. "What about y'all?"

Steve glances back at Stark. He's poking one of the pipes soldered onto the stone. "Just her and the ringer up here. We made it past them but she used the stone."

"That's not good," Nat chastises.

"I know it's not good. Stark's working on it."

"I am indeed working on it," Stark says calmly. "And I think I have a vague idea of what she did."

Good. Ideas are good. Steve slots his shield back into place on his back and walks over. "Can we reverse it?"

"No, but I think we can follow."

"Follow?"

He doesn't have Spidey-sense but Steve can still get a bad feeling. Especially when a super genius is about to poke a glowing stone that has that puts of something cosmic like the Tesseract or the stone from Loki's staff. "Hey Stark, let's hold up on doing anything we can't un—"

There's a flash of yellow light and Steve gets a feeling like Erskine's building him back up all over again.

"—do."

Then they're standing in a field in the middle of nowhere.

"What the hell did you do?"

Stark is something between awestruck and apologetic. "Followed her."

####

"Followed her" would normally mean hopping on a motorcycle and giving chase across hill and dale. Or maybe a heated race on top of a train and through the back alleys of a teeming metropolis.

In Steve's mind "followed her" does not entail using some kind of cosmic gem to **travel back in time**.

That is something that occurs in books.

Or possibly when working with Thor.

"How far back?" Steve's very good and doesn't growl the question. Just asks it in his most officious voice. The one he uses when dealing with reporters.

"Sec. JARVIS is calculating and—"

"And?"

There's a sigh and Stark removes his whole helmet. "We might have a problem."

"I figured that when you sent us back in time. How far back?"

"There's no satellites."

"That's—"

"Not even Sputnik."

Sputnik was one of the first things Steve learned about. He knows the precise day—the precise time—Sputnik launched. It's up there with the atom bombs and the Watt riots as far as he's concerned. "Pre-1957?"

"Surprise," he says weakly.

If his armor had lapels Steve would have grabbed him by them and flung him away. Instead he has to settle for marching towards the haze of lights in the distance. "Come on," he refuses to sigh, "let's find out where you brought us to."

"You know we can always," Stark makes a whistling noise and lays his hand flat. "GPS may not work but JARVIS might be able to make a map if I get up high enough."

"I'm pretty sure the last thing the timeline needs is a man flying around with jets strapped to his boots."

"Its not like I'm going to buzz anyone on purpose. Just a quick fly by at high altitude. Worst that can happen is I run into some Cold War fighter pilots."

"No."

Stark looks like he might disagree and if he did decide to jet off into the sunset Steve would have trouble stopping him without hurting him.

But thankfully he's not up to the fight that might ensues and instead follows behind Steve, blasting "heavy metal" out of the speakers he's built into the suit.

"It's hard rock," he sniffs, "AC/DC."

The fact that the song is called "Highway to Hell" is a little too on the nose for Steve and he makes him turn it off when they come upon one of those dusty little villages that he spent too many nights in during the war.

He actually tears up a little with nostalgia. The kind that Bucky and Peggy would have teased him about to no end.

"Remembering the old homestead," Stark asks quietly.

"Let's just find a newspaper."

A metal gauntlet reaches out to grab his bicep, "Hold up Cap. You think it might be a little suspicious if a wartime ghost just waltzed into town asking to know what year it is?"

"No more than a giant metal man," he snaps back.

There's a hiss and the Iron Man armor unfolds like origami allowing Stark to step out. He's wearing what Steve's heard him call "business casual."

"I don't think a Megadeath t-shirt is much better," Steve deadpans.

Stark waves him off. "It's fine. Now just," he holds his hands out, "stay here and try not to get noticed."

Before Steve can grab him and force him to come up with an actual plan Stark's dashing out into the open and jogging across the town square.

At least the kid's smart enough to head for what looks like a small grocery store.

Kid.

He's been hanging around Peggy too long. He can always tell because he starts referring to anyone under 90 as a "kid."

Which isn't so accurate when dealing with Fury.

Uncomfortably accurate dealing with Tony Stark though. It's like the guy hit puberty and then forgot to leave except when he needed to grow some facial hair.

"Like father like son," Bucky would snark at a comment like that.

Peggy would roll her eyes but there'd be a smirk.

He tries not to think about Peggy. Or Bucky.

But mainly Peggy.

It's some time before 1957. That means Peggy Carter is likely out there in the world alive and **whole** and not hidden away in a freezer by monsters.

"And you can't go messing with timelines," Steve mutters to himself. Doesn't matter how much he wants to.

Doesn't matter how easy it would be.

That was the lesson in "A Sound of Thunder."

It was one of his favorites after he woke up.

He blinks.

Peggy suggested it.

####

It's 1955.

1955 in Italy miles outside of Rome.

1955 and ten years since Steve crashed a plane to save a world. Ten years since everything got cold and dark. As far as he knows he's out there, a "Capsicle" as as Stark puts it. Frozen in time and just…waiting.

On the bus headed north Stark glances at him from under the brim of his fedora—picked up using Howard Stark's credit in Rome. "Thinking about what you could change?"

Steve says nothing, because questions like that don't warrant a response.

Stark shifts low in his bus seat and crosses his arms over his chest. "Because I am."

"What would you change," he shoots off, and its anything but conversational.

Stark, being as unflappable as an RAF pilot in a blitz, ignores the undercurrent of anger in Steve's voice. Just rattles it all off like it's from a list he references too often. "Your boy Bucky murders my parents in '91. I could warn them. Lose my sort of cousins in '76. Could save them. Got a godmother I'd love to have over for Thanksgiving but can't because she went down too. And there's Kennedy and Kennedy and a couple of astronauts that probably don't want to spend their last moments on fire." He sucks in a deep breath, glances at Steve with a look hard enough to instill some shame. "Just because you are history doesn't mean you're the only one that wants to change it."

Steve looks out the window. The hills of Italy roll just as smoothly as any in the Midwest. Maybe more trees though.

Definitely more trees.

Peggy used to tease him about how he compared every place they wound up in Europe to some place in the US. "You never even made it past New Jersey," she'd say with a laugh and a smile, "how on earth would you know?"

"The love of my life is somewhere out there right now Stark. She's alive." Not in a facility with half her mind gone and her heart ready to quit, but alive. Whole. "And I could be with her. Just walk right up and get that happy ending they all promised me."

His finger drags along the condensation on the window. He sketches something crude and sort of pretty in the dew.

"And what about her happy ending Rogers? You ever think you might not be it?"

Not for even a second.

####

The plan they made while walking down a gravel road towards Rome was to find money, clothes and help. Stark insisted his dad would never notice if they withdrew cash from one of his accounts in the city, so the money (and therefore the clothes) was easy.

Help was…more problematic. They couldn't go to SHIELD because that would clue in Peggy and Howard and open a can of warms that could have Steve up and about a good sixty years before he was supposed to be.

That was the same reason they couldn't reach out to the Commandoes.

It was Stark that had the big brainchild.

"I know someone," he'd insisted.

Steve had no idea who he could possibly know that would help and also not blink at **time travelers**. So he did what anyone would do and asked.

"My godmother—my mom's best friend. She was always very open minded." Like they're a couple of clean cut boys never looking for a date.

"And presumably in the States," Steve countered, "which doesn't do us much good trying to find a HYDRA spy in Italy."

"But that's the beauty," Stark had said. "She's not **in** the States."

She was in Milan.

Which is what led to the bus rides from Rome to Milan with suitcases full of expensive suits and an Iron Man.

And it's what led to the room at one of the nicest hotels Steve had ever seen.

And it's what led to him pulling at the tie of his tux as he stood in a club watching **the** Angela Carter put on a show.

"That's your godmother," he asks.

Stark nods and crunches on the ice from his drink. "She was kind of a big actress back in the day."

She played a bad version of Peggy in a movie once. To date it's the only picture of her's Steve's seen—even though she's about as iconic as Marilyn Monroe or Grace Kelly.

It was probably because of what happened with that car.

"How's a movie star going to help us?"

Stark ticks the reasons off with his fingers, "Money, connections and a really nice house. But mainly connections. She'll be in the crowd soon so you need to put on that awe shucks Cap charm and chat with her—"

"Me?"

"A much better looking version of Howard Stark showing up and saying he's his son from the future probably isn't going to work on Angie. But Captain America back from the dead—"

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm not—"

####

He does. Stark shoves him into Ms. Carter after she's finished doing some kind of Fred and Ginger number with an actual **count**. Steve's sweating because he still has never danced with a woman and then he's standing so close that he has to be a little in awe.

All the women he knows and he still feels like they don't make them like they used to.

"Watch it soldier boy," she says, her voice smooth and kind and she's pushing hair out of her eyes so she doesn't quite see him yet.

He swallows back nerves he thought he got rid of after fighting an alien invasion. "Mind if I have this dance," he asks.

And when she looks up she's startled—maybe because she's one of those millions of Americans who thought he was the country's savior back in the war—even if he wasn't.

But she recovers just as smoothly. An actress even in a moment as oddly intimate as this one in here in this swell of people on the dance floor.

"Sure."


	4. Chapter 4

One hand reaches up to fall gently on his shoulder and the other slides into his hand. It's small and cool but with an easy strength that always had him a little envious of girls like her. He tries not to look at it. Or at her. Tries not to think about how this is dancing.

He's practiced a few times. Alone in his apartment. Joked with Peggy about it afterwards.

But he hasn't actually **danced**. He couldn't.

Not unless it was with a very particular person.

And now he is being gently guided around the dance floor by an American icon.

"Star struck," she asks. And she's got that same quality Barbara Stanwyck always had. Electric. Engaging.

He saw The Lady Eve five times in the theater because of Stanwyck.

Peggy had the quality too.

Or has.

He chuckles and gives her a spin he's seen other guys do and if it's a bad spin and too fast and hard **the** Angela Carter doesn't show it.

Though when she spins back into him her fingers dig into his shoulder like she won't let go. "Not star struck."

He shrugs, "Maybe a little."

Steve's as surprised as anyone that he's talking to her. That he's being charming. **Cool**. Thank god for the future.

"I don't meet a lot of movie stars," he says.

She hums like she doesn't believe him, "Must be your first time here."

"It is actually. Never even been to Milan before."

"I'll have to take you on a tour then," she breathes, voice high and sultry all at once, "show you the sights."

He swallows, "You hardly know me."

"Oh I doubt that." Her fingers walk up his chest and she smiles like Steve's the sun. "I think I'm not the only one on this dance floor that's a little famous."

"There was a director over there—" He looks around, but she catches his jaw and directs him back towards her.

"I'm not talking about any director."

He gives her another spin. Tosses her. Catches her. She's flushed and he's flushed and he wishes he'd gotten to dance with someone else.

"I saw you in Jersey once," she sighs, "pitching war bonds." She's playing a game with him.

He pulls her close. "I saw you once too. In a picture. Only they got the name of your character all wrong."

"That a fact Cap?" It's a challenge and it makes her voice flint.

"It is Ms. **Carter**."

The song ends abruptly and Angela Carter is pressed up against Steve and her chest is heaving and she's looking at him with what he can only describe as **fury**.

"The man you're pretending to be is dead." So Angela Carter can play games but doesn't like to. He kind of likes her for it.

"I guarantee you I'm not."

That's when she scoffs and throws his hand away and stalks off the dance floor.

Or does as close to stalking as a star like her can in public. There are smiles and gracious asides and she keeps walking with purpose while Steve trails behind her.

She pauses periodically. Catches his eye. Dares him not to join her.

The backstage of the club is just like every other one Steve's been to. The fly rail is full of knotted off ropes and there's a cage for the stage manager and snakes of cables litter the floor.

"That's a fire hazard," he jokes when she trips over an especially fat one.

She rounds on him, "Just who the hell are you?"

"I thought that was pretty clear."

"Steve Rogers took a nose dive into the Atlantic ten years ago."

"I did." Steve's only ever had to do the back from the dead thing once, and that was Peggy and she **wanted** to believe and he had Nick Fury standing next to him insisting he was real.

This second time's not as easy.

She insists, "He died."

"I didn't."

"Stop saying I."

"What do you want me to say? I'm Steve Rogers. Captain America. Stars and stripes and tights and all—"

She's fast. That's the thing.

Angela Carter, dancer, singer and actress extraordinaire is **fast**. And armed. Which Steve isn't expecting. When she lashes out he catches her wrist and looks at her in disbelief. One because she tried and two because she **almost succeeded**.

But she comes up with her left even faster and she's got something like a pen in her hand and when it makes contact with Steve's ribs he seizes up.

A lot of electricity—a whole power station full—courses through him. Muscles and tendons go rigid and his jaw clenches shut and he makes an unflattering noise.

Then he collapses and Angela Carter scowls down at him and says, "Captain America's dead."

And Steve's embarrassed enough to wish she was right.

####

She rushes off-her high heels clicking on the stage floor. He hears the ka-thunk of the stage door closing behind her

He can't be there when she gets back.

Whatever—whoever-she is she's going to be bringing company and right now Steve feels like that time he had to run twelve blocks while being chased by a bully twice his size.

That's not good.

He tries to stand but his legs are telling him no and his arms are only just a little more agreeable.

The band's out there playing something loud and fast and Tony Stark hasn't shown up to check on him and Stark;s "godmother" is going to be back any second with "friends."

Steve's got to go and he's got to do it all alone.

"You and me," he grunts, "we just need to work together for the next couple of minutes."

Being muscles and tendons and bones Steve's body doesn't actually say anything back.

One hand—one arm—in front of the other Steve drags himself to the fly rail. His legs still aren't working but he's willing to bet his broad shoulders, courtesy of Erskine's genius, will be enough.

"Please be enough."

He starts climbing. At first he's pretty sure he looks just like that skinny kid who always needed a boost from Bucky to climb the rope in school, but the higher he goes the harder he breathes and the more of his body starts responding. By the time he's well above the stage and Angela Carter's back with just one "friend" he's nearly to a hundred percent.

He wraps the ropes around his wrists a few times and laces his legs through them and cranes his neck to get a better view.

He can only see the top of their heads. Or her head. Carter's caught in some light cast off from the stage manager's cage, but whoever she's brought back with her is still shrouded in darkness.

When she sees the spot Steve was supposed to still be convulsing on she stops short. "That's not good."

Her voice has changed. Not too much. There's a lack of structure to it now. A loss of poise.

She glances back at whomever she's brought back.

"What," she says, "I swear there was a guy I shoved a few thousand volts into flopping like a fish right **there**."

"Well it looks like he 'flopped' right out of the building afterwards."

That voice has Steve nearly losing his grip on the ropes he's entangled himself in. He squeezes tighter just to be safe and ignores the way his blood rushes in his ears.

Pressing his cheek to the rough rope helps him focus.

Breathe Steve.

"We should look for him. It's not like he could have gotten far after I used this thing."

She brandishes the pen she'd used and the other woman—the woman that sounds like someone Steve **really** can't see right now—plucks it out of her hand.

"How on earth did you get this? Did Howard give it to you?"

"No."

There's a beat of silence.

"Maybe I stole it out of his office." When the other woman, the one who sounds just like Peggy, groans, Angela Carter quickly says, "I was just looking out for myself! And good thing too because HYDRA's got a Captain America look-a-like trying to seduce me."

There's another long beat.

"Why on earth would he seduce you?"

"Excuse me for not stopping to interrogate the guy twice my size! I kind of figured you'd want to see him for yourself."

"Well, whomever he was he's gone." Steve watches the way she tilts her head. Sounding like Peggy. Moving like Peggy. "Which is troubling." Thinking like Peggy. "Howard couldn't walk for two hours when I zapped him with this."

That's definitely Peggy.

Angela Carter snorts. "Were you just testing it or—"

"He was making crude jokes involving you, me and Japanese cuisine."

"You're gonna give him brain damage you keep at it."

"Now you sound like Jarvis. I haven't given the man a concussion in two—three years!"

"Okay that's not—"

"Woah ladies! Is this where the party's at? I am shocked and hurt I wasn't invited." Tony Stark arrives on this particular scene as he does every other scene Steve's seen. With bluster, noise and too big a knowing grin. He actually shoots Peggy finger guns like she's a screaming fan and then slings an arm around Angela.

Even from up high Steve can see how rigid both women go. Peggy in particular is standing in a way Steve knows all too well and he braces himself for the punch she's about to land on Stark's jaw.

Only Stark's hand is wandering down for the baldest grope Steve's ever seen a sober man do.

Instead Peggy jams the pen into his jugular.

There is a lot from Steve to be furious and upset about at the moment, but the sight of Tony Stark yelping, convulsing and then hitting the stage like a sack of potatoes is not one of those things.

"It's just remarkable how this thing holds a charge," Peggy says conversationally.

"Think that'll learn him to be handsy," Angele Carter's wrapped her arms around herself protectively and is looking down at Stark.

Peggy laughs and Steve tries not to think about how much he's missed it. "Pavlov's womanizer."

The other woman groans. "Peg—"

"What I can't figure out is why he's back here. I thought we were very discreet."

"You think he was watching us?"

"Or distracting us. Letting his friend get away."

"Just because he was handsy?"

"That and," Peggy kneels down next to Stark. Pulls something off his wrist. "The watch. Not exactly the standard wear for a club."

####

When Stark is slapped out of his stupor five minutes later his eyes are blood shot and his tongue must be thick because he slurs. "Did we do it," he asks.

Steve sighs, "If by 'it' you mean make Peggy Carter think we're HYDRA operatives on a mission then yes."

"Yea," he cheers weakly.

"Why were you wearing a smart watch that hasn't been invented for sixty years?"

"It's pretty?"

Steve offers Stark a hand and yanks him up maybe a touch too fast. The other man lurches into him and paws at his arm for purchase. "Oh dizzy," he groans. "Real dizzy."

Good.

"Did you know Peggy Carter would be here?"

"She and Angie are inseparable, so there were good odds."

"So everything I said about keeping SHIELD and her out of this, did that just go—"

"In one ear and out the other? You bet." He shakes his head. "Look, I get you don't want to see her—"

"You don't—"

"Love of your life. Big honking torch for her and all that, but we need her."

"It wasn't your call to make Stark."

"And who says it was yours," he shoots back.

"It doesn't matter anyways. Because of your jewelry choice she thinks we're HYDRA. Next time she sees us she'll try to kill us."

"Or torture us to get intel. Peggy always struck me as a mean interrogator."

"She's efficient," he counters. "We need to get your watch back."

Stark seems to agree.

Then.

Then he pats his pocket and turns pale like a body left out in the cold.

"We might actually need to get more than my watch back."

"What?"

He pulls his pockets out. "She grabbed my room key."

####

All things considered Steve's keeping it together.

Peggy's alive and young and whole and he's racing towards her but he's **keeping it together**. He isn't thinking about what will happen next. Isn't thinking about timelines or catastrophe. Isn't thinking about her specifically.

That's the secret. Just keeping his mind on the mission. Tunnel vision. The kind everyone used to tease him about.

It's some side effect of Erskine's work. When he wants to be—when he needs to be—Steve can be hyper-focused.

Running all over Milan after his almost could have been is a great opportunity to practice.

"I want to be mad," Tony pants, "but I'm actually impressed."

"That a founder of SHIELD outmaneuvered you?"

"To be fair, I didn't know Peggy was SHIELD growing up." He's only barely keeping up with Steve and that has everything to do with the pace Steve's set.

Two men running through the streets could cause alarm, but one of them running faster than most of the cars might just tip the scales to panic.

Which they do not need.

"Didn't even know SHIELD existed."

"But you knew Peggy?"

"I had two godmothers. Those two ladies used to change my diaper."

"So you groped not one, but both of your godmothers."

"I'm gonna need therapy when I get back to 2015. And probably a dunk in a mikveh."

They hit the lobby and Steve has to reach out to catch Stark so he doesn't sail into a group of women rushing out and saying something about **the** Angela Carter being inside.

The two of them share a look.

Then they bolt for the elevator.

The ride up is agonizingly slow and Steve finds himself unconsciously straightening his tie and smoothing back his hair and just…he wants to look nice.

Stark, meanwhile, sags against the rail and sucks in deep breaths. "More cardio," he wheezes. "Definitely need more cardio."

"When we get in there don't crowd her."

"Not a problem."

"Just let me talk."

Stark gives him an a-ok.

"And don't—"

"Just to be clear. If Peggy Carter's in our room and wants to kill us you are absolutely going in first Cap."

####

Steve really wishes Peggy **didn't** want to kill them.

There's no actual time to talk when they get to the room. Peggy's so absorbed in what she's doing she doesn't hear Steve's key in the lock.

And there's this moment—just a second—where Peggy doesn't know he's there and Stark hasn't blundered in behind him and Steve can stare at the strong line of Peggy's back undisturbed. Can marvel at the way time hasn't yet shrunk the curves of her shoulders or crushed the arch of her back.

It's the first time in four years that Steve's had the chance to see Peggy—**his** Peggy. Unmolested by time. To see the way the light catches in her hair and strikes her skin. Causing it almost to glow.

She's not the woman consigned to a bed with her brain riddled by dementia. She's back. A second chance he never thought he'd have.

He takes a step forward. His heel strikes the carpet just loud enough.

And Peggy spins around, Steve's shield in both her hands, and unshed emotion shining in her eyes

Steve's seeing a dream but he gets the feeling Peggy's seeing just a ghost.

"Peggy," he breathes.

Just like that she's terrifying.

He's seen that exact look—maybe with a little more passion behind it. And last time he saw it he was the one carrying the shield and all he had to do was bring it up to deflect a few well placed bullets.

This time she's got the shield and the gun.

Stark crashes in behind him. "Did you find her—"

Steve pushes Stark away so hard he smacks into the wall, the plaster shattering. Peggy's bullets whizz through the empty space between the two of them and she wastes no time.

She bum rushes, the shield in front of her like a battery ram.

He tries to grab it but she swings and God. God damn he's forgotten how hard Peggy Carter hits.

A vibranium shield helps.

She clocks him in the skull and when Tony tries to make a grab for her he gets an elbow to the nose. Steve reaches again, only to get smacked with the shield and then, and he's not real clear on this next part, he's getting her heel in his temple.

Everything's black for a second and when his vision's cleared she's out the door and Stark's shaking his head.

"Like a Mack truck," he's muttering. Blood's cascading down the front of his face and his nose is already swelling.

Steve pushes himself up and out the door after her. His head's ringing like a bell.

Peggy's fast as she runs down the hall, and she holds Steve's shield almost like she was born to it. She's got that control most people lack.

If she wasn't half way down the hall with **his** shield and what looks like Stark's helmet in a bag on her hip he'd pause to be awestruck.

"Peggy!"

She stops. Turns. Stares. Tilts her head as though she were furiously daring him to say her name again.

Steve's no fool. He keeps his mouth shut.

But he cautiously edges forward.

That's all she needs.

Her movements are so efficient. So ruthless. Her gun arm snaps around towards the window at the end of the hall and she starts firing as she hurtles towards it.

Behind him Stark utter an explicative.

The window shatters as she catapults herself through it.

"That's ten stories," Stark shouts.

He rushes for the window with most of his armor chasing after him.

Steve's survived a ten story fall with the shield. It wasn't pleasant. Knocked the wind out of him.

Peggy doesn't have a serum enhanced body to help absorb the fall, but she's smaller than him. Small enough that she might be able to curl up in the shield. Let it take the whole impact.

She's got to be small enough.

When they get to the window she's already on the pavement below and it's cracked from the impact.

She doesn't move.

The jets in Stark's suit fire up.

"Wait."

She had to be small enough. Compact.

"She just fell ten stories. I'm not—"

She had to be.

Peggy stirs. Standing is clearly an effort and it takes her an agonizingly long time to push herself up.

When her eyes track to the window they're hanging out of she fires again.

The bullets ping harmlessly off the walls around them and one wings Stark's gauntlet.

A fast looking car screeches to a stop beside her. Steve can't be sure, but it looks like Angela Carter driving. She honks and Peggy dashes for the car as best she can with a significant limp.

"Jesus," Stark mutters, but there's that quality to his voice he gets when he sees some particularly ingenious science. "Come on. We can catch up to them with the suit."

"No."

"Are you cr—"

"We can't risk you being seen chasing after them."

"She's got my helmet! And watch! **And** your shield. Don't you think that might be just a little bit of a risk?"

"I think—" that Steve needs to sit down. Needs to take a minute to get his head in order.

Maybe Peggy does too.

It's not every day you see someone back from the dead.

Or back to their youth.

Just…back.

In their line of work you give up on that early.

"We can use your helmet to track her right?"

"Sure. As long as she doesn't hit it with a sledgehammer—which knowing Peggy—"

"Then we wait. She needs time."

Stark's jaw tightens and he studies Steve like he's a readout from a computer.

Then, he does something he's never done.

He acquiesces.

But the patronizing hand on Steve's shoulder nixes any chance of it being a friendly and understanding gesture.

He shoves Stark's hand away and returns to the room to gather their things.

They move to another less upscale hotel and use another name and Steve lies on a bed with bad springs that dig into his back and stares up at a ceiling that's browned with water damage.

And he shies away from that ability to focus. Because now it's turned to Peggy Carter and the way she looked at him before she jumped out of a building just to escape him.


	5. Chapter 5

Angie wakes up to an empty bed and the less than soothing pop of gunfire.

The clock says seven and she tries to go back to sleep, pillow firmly clamped over her ears. But that pop pop pop is insistent.

So she pushes out of bed with a groan and wraps her silk robe around herself to fend off the early morning chill and heads downstairs.

Natalie peeks out of her room, hair ruffled from sleep and pistol clenched in her small hand. "Everything all right?"

"It's fine."

She nods and yawns and slams her door shut.

She wants to say it isn't fair the kid can sleep through the racket but then she remembers **why** the kid can sleep through the racket of gunfire and keeps her mouth shut.

By the time she's prepped a tray of Blood Marys and the painkillers for Peggy's whole left side Peggy's moved from the pistol to some kind of rifle that she's trying to use one-handed.

It's not going so well.

"Pretty sure you shouldn't be shooting that with that shoulder."

Peggy's left arm is in a sling and she's got a really nasty limp and a bruise from her ribs all the way to her toes (Angie knows because she checked). All on account of the fact that she decided she needed to jump out of a ten story window with nothing but **Captain America's shield** to break her fall.

If she wasn't so banged up Angie'd beat her with that damn shield. Instead Peggy's got it propped up against an ornamental statue and is taking shots at it to try and dent it.

The broken hammer and wrecked hacksaw suggests she tried something a little less violent first.

"I should be fine," Peggy growls, but she's annoyed and holding the gun all wrong and when she shoots she loses control of the rifle and only barely keeps from shooting two decorative trees, a marble bust of some muse or their mother or something.

And Angie.

They stare at one another in a state of shock for a good while longer than is acceptable before Angie wordlessly holds out a drink and Peggy takes it and sits on the edge of the lounge chair.

There's this big elephant out there on the patio with them. A giant one that they're both pointedly ignoring and have been since last night when they come home and Angie played doctor and then they went to bed without much talking.

This elephant's even got a physical manifestation in the form of that shield that's still shining patriotically in the morning sun.

"Couldn't sleep," Angie asks.

Peggy reaches out and squeezes Angie's foot, a silent apology for nearly blowing her to kingdom come. And for her reticence.

Woman thinks her old boyfriend's back from the dead and she gets a lot less talkative around the current squeeze.

She sighs and turns back to look at the shield. Angie's foot is still in Peggy's hand so she flexes it to get her attention. "You know, if you're inclined, I'm pretty good at listening."

Peggy knows that. It's been kind of the foundation of their whole relationship. Nearly ten years of off and on knowing each other and Angie's still that girl with a pot of coffee ready to lend an ear and Peggy's still that reserved woman with a brittle smile.

She smiles in thanks. Then looks back at the shield. "I don't know what that thing is, but it's not Steve."

She's so passionately assured that it has Angie thinking maybe she's wrong. Especially because of that shield. Still shining.

"A lot of fellas have access to shields that stop bullets?" And cushion ten story falls.

"No, which is all the more troubling. Someone's gone to a great deal of effort to mimic Steve Rogers."

"Maybe, but why's he in Milan talking to me? I'd think if someone made this guy to impersonate Captain America they'd send him to, you know, America."

"I'm here. This could just be HYDRA trying to—"

"What?"

"Destabilize me. If I'm focused on this mystery I can't be focused on their other plans here in Italy can I?"

"You think HYDRA built a copy of Captain America to distract you?"

"It's the only thing that makes sense."

Angie wants to point out that she's seen enough now to know there are a lot of reasons a guy could look like Steve Rogers and only eighty percent of them are related to evil competitive spy organizations trying to do Peggy's head in.

That other twenty percent…

She doesn't actually want to touch that other twenty percent with a ten foot pole. Because there lies possible truths Angie just couldn't bear. Like war heroes back from the dead and looking to return to the love of their life.

"What doesn't make sense is how they replicated the shield. Steve's shield was made of an incredibly rare metal that possessed qualities impossible to replicate with inferior metals."

"So they couldn't just whip it up in metal shop?"

Peggy purses her lips, "No." She stands again, snatches up her pistol, and empty the clip directly into the star at the shield's center.

Even the paint doesn't scratch.

Angie won't point out that that means Peggy's shooting at Captain America's actual shield. Won't point out that she's probably known that since she picked it up in the hotel. She wouldn't have trusted anything less to protect her when she jumped.

She's said it again and again in private.

Captain America was the one always there to catch her when she fell.

####

Natalie emerges from her room a few hours later. She cranes her neck to get a good look at the patio, but the shield, and Peggy, are long gone by then.

"She head back to DC with her find?"

Angie shakes her head. "She's upstairs on the phone with Howard."

"Must be something to all this if she's calling Stark."

She doesn't tell Nat that Howard built Roger's original shield. Mainly because she's pretty sure that's still classified information.

The only reason she knows is on account of sometimes she and Peggy'd be sitting in bed with one of them wrapped around the other and they'd talk. About ex-girlfriends and dead war heroes and all the things they'd missed in the seven years they'd been apart.

"I think she needed to clear her head. You know, talk to someone who knew him." Angie's moved from Bloody Marys to the coffee she swore off. The caffeine's bracing in a way rich vodka-based beverages aren't. Her fingers press into the sides of the mug and she wonders if it'd break if she press her enough.

Nat just looks at her. **Knowing**. "Sure."

She chucks a washcloth at the kid's head and she snatches it out of the air and gently hangs it to dry on the over handle.

Taking another sip of the her coffee Angie asks, "Seeing as you and I aren't needed here and you're grounded until she's finished sorting this out what say we go into town?"

"Grounded?"

"Not…" Angie hopes she isn't blushing. "Military grounded. Just military."

"Oh I—" Nat opens and closes her mouth. "Why are we going to town?" She starts cutting open a piece of fruit with nauseating efficiency.

"Because shopping's fun."

She plucks a piece of the flesh off her knife and chews it noisily. "No it isn't."

"Because I need groceries."

She swallows and that's just as obnoxious sounding, "I bought some last night."

Angie grabs the knife off the place setting in front of her and flings it at the fruit, just like she'd seen Peggy and Nat do the first morning back in the villa when they were being tetchy show offs.

It lands impressively, burrowing deep.

Nat's eyes get as big as saucers.

"Or maybe because I need out of the house and you and Peggy'll flip if I go alone. So get your caboose moving and escort me into town."

"When did you learn to throw a knife?"

Angie glares. "I'm a fast learner."

####

"Hey fast learner," Nat mutters, "You're being followed."

Nat, being a tiny child spy, doesn't stop to explain that. She keeps walking and pretending like she doesn't know Angie.

Angie takes a quick peek over both shoulders but doesn't see any shady looking fellas in fedoras so she goes back to trying to decide on which olive oil to buy. Her hands shake and she squeezes one can until it dents.

Guess that solved the choice issue. She sets it in her basket. Mosies down the aisle real slow. That was always the trick when she and her brother and cousins robbed banks. Go slow. Only get crazy when you've got no other choice.

In the next aisle she reaches in to grab a box of cookies. Nat catches her hand through the hole in the shelf and her thumb grazes her wrist. "Relax," she says, "You'll be fine."

Easy for the assassin to say.

"Just keep shopping. I'll follow. Okay?"

"What—"

"We're rooting them out Angie." Suddenly a grin spreads across her cherubic little cheeks. "It'll be fun."

But it will not be fun!

It will never be fun!

Playing spies is the **opposite** of fun as far as Angie is concerned.

Slow lazy morning sex? Fun. Fast cars on sharp turns? Fun. Having Peggy teach her how to shoot and then it devolving into more slow lazy morning sex? Fun fun fun.

Walking down the streets of Lake Como's town center while being trailed by deadly spies **not fun**.

It's for the birds.

She needs a drink.

Figuring her tail might be thirsty too she steps into a cafe that could have been lit better and orders a glass of grappa that she immediately drinks too fast. Somewhere Peggy's getting annoyed and has no idea why.

The waiter eyes her warily when she orders another.

As does the man who slides into the seat opposite her. "I'd be careful," he says, "I hear grappa can give you a nasty headache."

This Steve Rogers imposter looks just as real and just as good as he did the night before. Like that fella on the stage in New Jersey alive and well all over again.

"Drink a lot of grappa when locked in mortal combat with the Red Skull," she asks.

He smiles like he's being teased. "No. Don't really ever drink. Doesn't do anything for me."

She mock toasts him, "You're missing out."

He tilts his head and she wonders if the real Steve Roger was this good at seeming to care. "Any reason you're drinking before five?"

She snorts into her drink. "Been drinking before noon."

Steve Rogers, or the evil spy disguised to look like Steve Rogers, frowns.

She's still talking into her glass, "So you got mobile pretty quickly after I zapped you the other night."

"It's a gift."

"Who are you?"

He frowns again. Sighs.

And Angie leans in. "Because he's dead." He has to be. This guy across from her doesn't know how much she needs him to be dead.

God he's got eyes like a damn puppy. "I survived the crash," he says softly, "and then I slept for a very long time."

"Ten years," she challenges.

He's wistful. "Longer."

"How—"

He looks around. Fidgets. Sorts through whatever he's gonna say. Then takes in a deep breath and leans in like he's got a doozy of a story to tell a good friend. "Two days ago I was in 2015 battling a HYDRA insurrection and now I'm in 1955," he reaches out with a hand that's achingly, wonderfully, warm and kind, "and I came here because I need your help."

She's shivering. Like she's been left out in the cold. She hopes he can't feel it. "Why me?"

Another chair scrapes on the floor and is filled suddenly by the man with the facial hair and the wandering hand from the club. He grins like he's meeting an idol. "That way my idea." He holds his hand out, "Tony Stark. In about fifteen years you're going to be my godmother."

She doesn't want to believe him. To believe **either** of them, but the guy's got that look— "Should have known," she grumbles, "You've got Howard's smug looking mug. And tact too."

Roger's ducks his head and oh boy does he have a smile. The kind that'd turn a girl straight.

Tony Stark isn't even phased. "I know. My mom always said my greatest enemy was genetics."

"Not your ego," Rogers asks.

"Better enemy than a cold bath—"

"Enough." She slaps the table loud enough that the waiter pauses to look over. She's definitely shivering and she sticks her hand between her legs to try and stop it. Talks in a hushed tone,"So far all you two have done is confuse me and scare the everliving stuffing out of me. So how about now you just try and prove it."

"You've got Roger's shield. Isn't that proof?"

Natalie had claimed she was watching her. To "root them out." She really wishes that kid would show up soon. Preferably with a gun and that little garrote she's always fiddling with.

"I need more than that."

Rogers scratches at his neck. "We can tell you who the next president is. Or who wins the World Series."

"Because I feel like waiting that long."

Stark snaps his fingers, "Tell her something only you and Peggy'd know."

That has Roger's blushing as red as the one bit of his shield. "I—Why would she know?"

"They're friends."

And the way Stark says 'friends' has Angie hoping they really are crazy because otherwise the future isn't such a hot place. She'd kind of hoped by 2015 she and Peggy'd be more than "friends."

Stark nods—pleased with his own plan, "Go ahead. What would she know?"

"I don't… I'm private Stark. So's Peggy. She's not just gonna tell one of her coworkers—"

"Friend—" she corrects him, the word bitter as borax in her mouth.

"She's not just gonna go telling her things."

And Stark, well he really does habe to be a Stark, because he's very clearly setting Steve Rogers up and he's positively gleeful about it.

And Angie's so irritated she can just growl, "Try me" and squeeze her thigh through her skirt to stop the shivering.

Still beet red Rogers thinks. Opens his mouth. Closes it. Finally, "In the war, before the Commandos I had a sketchbook. Only ever showed the pictures to Peggy—"

He goes on describing this sketchbook but Angie's too busy listening to the new sound. A roar between her ears. Like she's sitting right on the engine of a plane. Or has her head under the hood when someone gives the car all the gas. It's loud enough it's impossible to think.

At least she's not shivering any more.

"—What was I always drawing in it?"

Angie's mouth is dry like a rosin box. "Her." Her throat's scratchy and she wishes the waiter was back with another drink.

Roger's just looks disappointed. "Anyone would—"

"And you. As a monkey. Dancing."

Rogers is staring hard now. His face a mask. Like that statue of him down in Arlington.

"See," Stark crows. "She has to be friends with Peggy. Who else would—wait. Shit. I guess you should have asked him something huh? Instead of the other way around? Sorry about that. I haven't watched Back to the Future in at least three years—"

That statue of an America hero nods.

Ask away little Angie Martinelli from Red Hook.

"Peggy and Rogers," she looks down at her empty glass. There's just a single drop of grappa clinging to the bottom and she'd love nothing more than to lick it out. "They made plans right before he," she swallows. "Before he was gone. And she never detailed them in her reports. Never told anyone. Ever."

Except Angie.

One of those mournful little asides she had to pull out of her like stray thread out of one of her skirts. It was a big deal when she told her. They'd been all naked and happy and then she'd looked at the clock and gotten so melancholic. She'd been sitting between Angie's legs with her bare back pressed into Angie's chest and Angie's chin on her shoulder and she'd looked so sad until Angie had asked. Had prodded. Had begged with nothing more than soft kisses on her shoulder.

"Stork Club. Eight o'clock," he says, and maybe he's as cold and dull as she feels.

"Don't be late," she whispers.


	6. Chapter 6

Natalie the teenage assassin doesn't give them all time to process things. Things like time travel and "just friends" and a romantic triangle no one ever planned to be a part of. She's just sliding into that fourth seat at the table and aiming a pistol at Roger's from underneath.

"Captain America," she purrs, "it's a real pleasure." She cracks her gum, either for emphasis or to irritate everyone.

Probably both.

Angie's a little afraid to take her eyes off the All-American hero, but does to say, "Nat would you put that away?"

Instead of putting it away the girl **cocks** the gun.

"You're gonna have to understand my confusion," she says in the same conversational way she and Angie discussed what groceries to buy, "I thought you were dead."

Rogers—Steve—Steve Rogers, love of Peggy's life and savior of the **world** hasn't even looked at Nat. He's still watching Angie like she's full of important Nazi secrets.

Stark leans back, his legs spread wide like the worst fellas on the subway. "And here we though you weren't even born yet."

She looks cruelly offended, "Excuse me?"

He leans in again and peers at her, forcing Nat to arch away without actually moving. "Seriously. Who does your work because you look almost the exact same. Maybe a little younger." He squints. "A lot younger. What did you hit thirty and just decide "nah?"

"I don't—" she looks from Angie and back to Tony Stark, deeply, profoundly, confused. It's a first for the kid. "What?"

"We. Know. You." He says slowly, like talking to a child. "From. The. Future."

Teen assassins apparently done faze the man that went fist to fist with the Red Skull. Steve's still staring hard at Angie, his arms crossed and the fabric of his jacket tight across his shoulders. "She told you?"

He's not paying attention to Nat and Stark Jr, who are now conversing in a real terse and painful kind of way. Maybe for the same reason Angie can't quite process what Stark's saying either. Maybe because focusing on the present and the personal and the excruciating is easier than considering time travel and kids who never grow old.

"We're friends."

She can hear a pin drop in the silence that follows. Nat and Stark stop talking to watch with a mixture of wariness and something she doesn't want to consider and Steve…that beautiful all-American jaw is set firm.

Then he asks, "Is she okay?"

There's no challenge of what Angie is to Peggy. No revulsion or curiosity. Just concern.

"Last night when she saw me she seemed like she knew it was me, but then—" he shakes his head, "I just need to know she's okay."

"She's fine," Angie says evenly. She shoots a quick glance at Nat who gives her a small, almost imperceptible shrug.

The silence is worst than when she brought Peggy home for Christmas last year. It's **aggressively** loud.

"She doesn't think it's really me does she?"

"She thinks your HYDRA."

He smiles, "She would. Makes more sense doesn't it? Than a guy back from the dead?"

"Yeah." Why does he have to be so decent? Why can't he be irritating like Stark's kid? Or handsy? Or cocky?

Everything would be a heckuva lot easier if he wasn't **nice**.

"Do I kill him," Nat asks out of the blue. "Because say the word and Cap stays dead."

"Cap" rounds on her in shock while Stark mumbles something about "people skills coming with age."

Angie's mouth drops open. Then snaps shut. Then she blusters—"You're not killing him Nat, either of them."

"So what are we doing with them?" Another crack of her gum, "Because someone is going to eventually notice Captain America's traipsing around Northern Italy."

"We're looking for someone," Steve says. "All we have to do is find her and then we can go back to our own—to 2015."

"Is that what you want?" Why does Angie ask that?

"It's what has to happen," he says. So sure. His confidence is enviable.

But…he swallows too. And there's this turn of his mouth. Just little things. Something Stark and Nat are too busy bickering and complaining to notice.

About all Angie now knows about Steve Rogers is he grew up just south of her in Brooklyn, loved the same woman she loves, is shaped like a fancy statue

and absolutely does not want to return to 2015.

####

Triage. When a kid twisted their ankle real bad at the twin's birthday party and they had to scramble to get them to the hospital and soothe the dozen kids who saw it happened.

Angie didn't actually do all the triaging—the "crisis management." But she watched Peggy at work. She's seen her manage this stuff a dozen times and she has to hope some of it's rubbed off on her.

Sort of like how she can throw a knife with startling accuracy now.

She puts Nat in charge of squirreling the two of them away. "Just until we can find this Lady Hydra," she tells all three of 'em.

"Madame Hydra," Steve corrects her out of habit.

Then he flushes.

"Sorry."

She smiles, the big one she reserves for fans on the red carpet, "No problem."

Tony Stark notices the smile and gives her a look she can't even begin to understand.

"Thank you for all the help," Steve says warmly and Angie feels guilty because she's sleeping with his girl and he's either too kind to care or doesn't know it.

Stark raises his hand like he's in elementary school. "Help's great and all, but do you really expect us to just sit in a house being baby sat by a, no offense, baby?"

"Yes?"

"I'm almost eighteen," Nat says gruffly.

"And how are **you** going to find Madame Hydra anyways? You're an actress, not a spy."

"Hey you came to me pal, remember?"

He crosses his arms. "Not for this kind of help."

"Stark." Steve says his name like a warning. Then he looks at her apologetically. That same look people give her when they think she's too dumb to pick up on the conversation. "He is right though. We can't just sit around and wait."

"One night then. Can you give me one night? Just to…" To tell sort her head out. To take a breath. To tell the love of her life her boyfriend's back from the dead.

"One night?" Stark actually **scoffs**. "HYDRA's travelled back in time. They're currently planning to end a timeline I kind of actually **like**. We don't have a night."

"We've waited this long Tony—we can wait one more night—"

"Because **you** made us take a bus all the way from Rome—"

"We're giving her the night." That must be the voice he uses when he's wrapped up in red, white and blue and saving the world, because the authority in it shuts Tony Stark up fast.

"That's all we can give you," he says softly. God. Why does every look Steve Rogers give her feel like it's gonna break her? Why can't he stop looking at her?

She swallows.

"And it has to be early," Stark says. "The longer we tool around 1955 the worse things could get."

Right. Because **time travel**.

One night. It's barely afternoon and it already feels like the whole day's nearly gone.

####

Peggy's passed out on the couch when Angie gets home. Her head's lolled back and her mouth is open and she's softly snoring. The shield is propped up on the chair opposite her and if Angie had to guess she'd say Peggy's spent the last hour or so staring balefully at the thing.

There's no gun out, which is a first for Peggy's relationship with the shield.

And sleeping.

She doesn't wake when Angie comes in. Or when she comes closer.

But she never does when it's Angie or the kids. Once said it was something about "subconsciously recognizing her."

Angie told her that was the most romantic load of bunk she'd ever heard and Peggy'd ducked her head and gotten all bashful.

She wakes up now because Angie kneels on the couch next to her and plays with her hair. Runs her fingers through it. Watches the way the strands race across her finger tips.

Relishes that little noise Peggy makes in the back of her throat as she stirs.

Tries not to take too deep a breath. Tries not to show too much of the mess her head's become.

"How long was I out," Peggy asks.

"Not too long," Angie whispers.

Peggy's still loosed limbed from her long nap (and maybe some of the painkillers she should be on) and her head sort of flops to the side when she turns to look at Angie. "How was town?"

Angie's still real quiet. It's so peaceful there. For the first time in a while they're alone. No one's expected.

One night.

"Fine. Bought some groceries. Abandoned Natalie."

That earns a little frown. "I thought we agreed you wouldn't be left alone until we knew what HYDRA was up to."

"We did," she lets her hand, still in Peggy's hair, still and she leans in to kiss her gently, "But I needed some time to myself."

Fingers fall on her thigh. Start to squeeze and then stop themselves. As if Peggy's suddenly the confused and nervous one. "It's not—is it because I was preoccupied this morning?"

"No." Why can't Angie talk louder than this whisper?

"Howard can't come himself but he's sending a technician to look at the shield. If we figure out how they've managed to mimic vibranium maybe we can figure out where these—this—imposter came from."

There's a cut on Peggy's forehead from all that glass she ran through the night before. Angie mended it as best she could with some butterfly stitches and it's scabbed over quickly. Her thumb skims over it and Peggy gives her another odd look. "Angie what's wrong?"

Angie wants to tell her everything's wrong and she wants to be brave and say nothing's wrong. But it's rough finding the words she ought to use so she snatches up Peggy's hand and pulls the both of them off the couch.

"I'm thinking of a new dance to do for the show tonight. Practice with me?"

Peggy thinks she's crazy and she's got one eyebrow arched for good measure, but she leans against the arm of the couch and crosses her arms and waits all good-naturedly as Angie finds just the right song to play from the meager selection of LPs she keeps on hand.

They're all pop standards and jazzy bits. Most a little old. Their sleeves smell musty. Not like the collection she's got back in DC. Those are used on the regular. For dinner parties and birthday parties and slow nights when it's just Angie and Peggy and the kids all sitting around doing little to nothing.

Peggy's amused by the song she settles on. "Little fatalistic don't you think?"

Angie figures that playing "Let's Face the Music and Dance" is more on the nose than fatalistic, but in the moment, looking at Peggy in the fading light of the day, it's so appropriate it hurts.

"I used to use this song as a line to pick up girls," she jokes.

Peggy rolls her eyes, "You would."

"Didn't always work."

"Just some of the time?"

She shrugs.

Peggy watches her with that old inscrutable look Angie's never learned to read. She looks like she's gonna say something. Gonna ask something Angie doesn't want to answers.

They stare at one another and Angie wonders if all the begging to up high she's doing can be read like a book.

Then Peggy gets all bright and hums pleasantly and holds her hand out, "Your line's working now. If you want it to?"

Want it? Angie needs it.

Peggy's limp's barely there and she leans into Angie as they dance. Let's her hold her up. She's heavy and solid and Angie could cry just being there with her.

The dancing itself is nothing like what Angie's used to. There's no twirling or fancy footwork. Just gentle swaying as they stand together. More a hug—an embrace—than a dance.

"I'm afraid I'm a bit rubbish," Peggy murmurs.

"Well sure, compared to Gene…"

She pinches Angie's waist, "Not fair." There's laughter in her voice for the first time in a day.

"But I'd rather dance with you any day Peggy."

She squeezes Angie in her arms. Sighs into her hair.

And they don't talk.

That's the beauty of the two them. No talking. No need for it. Peggy relaxes in Angie's arms and Angie stops thinking about the All-American hero hidden away somewhere in town.

That whole world full of spies and lies and murder just goes away.

"Is this Armistice Day," Peggy finally says softly, warm puffs of air on Angie's cheek.

"Can it be?"

The arms that were settled on Angie's waist wrap around her back and pull her so close she can hear how steady Peggy's heartbeat is.

####

She goes to work afterwards because well-paying club gigs can't wait for their star's personal life to self-destruct. She sings and she dances and Peggy isn't waiting for her when the show's over.

A message from Nat is. "Man child flew the coop. Patriot's taking a nap."

She doesn't—can't do the normal glad-handing tonight. "I'm not feeling well," she tells anyone who listens. And when she sees how pale she looks in the mirror while she changes to leave she gets why no one called her on the bluff.

When she gets home there's an unfamiliar car in the driveway.

And an unconscious Tony Stark in the foyer.

And Peggy's poking him with her toe. "Dear," she says, "HYDRA's agents are **really** going to shit."


	7. Chapter 7

The problem with making plans involving teenage spies and secret time travelers is that they can get derailed real fast. Especially when one of them is the billionaire playboy son of a billionaire playboy and probably never learned phrases like "hold your horses."

Tony Stark, still laid out on the foyer, moans. Just like any fella knocked unconscious and coming to is like to.

Peggy sighs in a very put upon way. "I suppose we should tie him up. Can you be a dear and fetch some rope?"

Angie coughs. "We won't need to."

That gets a raised eyebrow, "Oh?"

She hopes to God she isn't flushing, because Peggy could interpret that all wrong. "No. I kind of sort of know him."

Her eyebrow shows no signs of going down. "You know him."

"I do."

Peggy keeps staring.

Finally—"Biblically?"

"What?! No! Jesus Peggy—"

"I just thought they way you were talking—you **know** him. What else am I supposed to infer?"

"I'm so queer my ma tried to get a whole river blessed so she could dunk me in it. Why on earth would I sleep with—with that?" She points her finger down at the unconscious fella.

He moans again.

Peggy nudges his cheek with her toe. "I haven't the foggiest. But you can't blame me. You **did** sleep with half of Hollywood while we were apart—"

"The girl half—and you said you were okay with it—"

"I am—"

"Doesn't sound like it. You bring it up all the damn—"

"Dietrich Angie. **And** Garbo. I may be extraordinary but that's an awful lot of gorgeous iconic woman to compete with—"

"They compete with you you lunk. Half the reason me and Greta ended things was I said you're name while we were—"

"Really?"

"Yeah!"

And Angie isn't even gonna get into the bit where Peggy said "while we were apart" like she wasn't the reason—all going off to martyr herself to protect Angie.

She's breathing fast and Peggy's grinning like there's been something missing and now she's found it again.

Then she seems to remember the unconscious Tony Stark. And the grin sort of wilts. "So how **do** you know him?"

"Peggy I'm trying to sleep," he mumbles.

She looks down at him like he's especially interesting mold on some cheese. Than back at Angie, "More importantly how does he know me?"

While a lot of Angie failing to tell Peggy about Steve has to do with him being Steve Rogers, another part of it is the whole line about time travelers.

"He's a Stark," she says carefully.

Peggy blinks. "Howard hasn't got any family."

"Yet."

Now she just looks amused. "So what? This," she jabs him with her toe again and he makes an ouch noise. "This is his son from the future?"

Give the woman a prize.

"You can't be serious."

She appraises the unconscious fella, "He kind of looks like him. And you yourself said the watch and helmet weren't like anything you'd ever seen."

"That doesn't mean—time travel isn't possible."

"Neither was blue death rays or super soldiers Peggy."

That gets as close to a harrumph as Peggy's ever gonna do. "Fine, get his feet."

Angie, still in her fancy evening gown, grabs Tony Stark's feet and Peggy takes his shoulders (and most of his weight) and they walk him back towards the other side of the house with a lot of grunting—from Angie because the fella is heavy and from Peggy because she's having to do it one-handed.

"So what precisely do they feed them in the future?"

"Too damn much," Angie wheezes.

She figures out what Peggy's got planned when Peggy slides the back door open with her hip, and while she's inclined to protest, she's also irritated enough with Stark to keep her mouth shut.

"On three," Peggy says, and she swings one side of him and Angie swings the other and then they chuck him in the pool.

Smooth as butter Peggy's got a gun out of where she's squirreled it away in her sling and aims it at the man who comes out of unconsciousness with a lot of thrashing and spluttering.

He stops, sinks a little and then calmly treads water when he realizes who's looming over him.

"I'm guessing you explained," he asks Angie.

She shrugs.

"She's telling the truth," he tells Peggy.

"So you're Howard Stark's son from the future?"

"2015."

"And you just happened to travel back to—"

"Stop some HYDRA baddie from doing something very naughty."

"And you brought—what—Steve Roger's clone?"

He looks back at Angie, "You didn't tell her?"

"Tell me what?"

He glares at Angie and she wants to dissolve. Then he goes and wrecks everything Angie's built. "Steve Roger's took a seventy year nap Peggy. That guy you whacked with his shield was the real deal."

A Stark's inability to gently relay sensitive information must be genetic.

Peggy's aim waivers. She looks at Angie. Then back at Tony. Then back at Angie.

Then she throws her gun at Tony Stark's head and stalks into the house.

When Angie tries to follow her—because that's what you do when someone you care about is upset—Stark calls after her. "She'll be okay!"

She rounds on him because the **bastard** and is surprised to find he's pulling himself out of the pool and ignoring the welt on his forehead. "This kind of emotional trauma's nothing to her," he says. He grunts and spins to sit on the edge of the pool, legs dangling in the water, "I mean it will be. She just needs to sort it out."

"And you know this—"

"My mom never talked to her siblings and my dad never had family. All those holiday dinners were spent with the two of you."

"So you know us."

He's looking out towards the lake that's glowing from the fat moon overhead. "I do." Then he pats the edge next to him. "Want to sit for a while. She needs a break and I need some quality time with my favorite godmother."

"I don't think you're supposed to have a favorite." She sits anyways.

"Peggy was always my dad's friend first and he—"

Angie can only guess what kind of father Howard Stark would be. Attentive at first. Affectionate. But she could see him forgetting sometimes. Getting distant and distracted.

She fiddles with her fingers, "So whose friend was I? Jarvis's?"

He laughs, "Sure. But mainly my mom's. You two were," he laces his fingers together and Angie feels awful about all the past tense he's using to describe a friendship between her and a woman she hasn't even met yet.

"And spoilers," Angie has no clue what that means, "Having a godmother who could rebuild engines with her eyes closed and dance as good as Fred Astaire was a pretty big deal for me as a kid."

"As good as Fred. I'll have to let him know."

"You guys do a movie in a year or two. You always talked about how you hated the romance because he's old enough to be your dad, but it was worth it for the dance numbers."

"Tony?"

"Yeah?" He kicks the water with his foot. The violence of it distorting that smooth surface.

"You keep talking about me in the past tense."

"I do." He doesn't elaborate, but his hand finds hers and he gives it a squeeze, eyes still on the lake or the moon or anything but her. "I missed you."

She squeezes back. "How good are these dance numbers," she asks, "people talk about them like him and Ginger?"

Tony shakes his head and laughs.

#####

The sun is nearly on the horizon when Angie finally heads upstairs. She's left Tony curled up on the couch hugging a cushion and she's called Nat and been told "Roger's is gonna be asleep for days." Which isn't the best news in the world but at least keeps things nicely stalled.

Angie wishes time wasn't one of those things that just kept on marching forward. She wishes it could slow down or stop all together. At least for a few days. Hours.

Years.

Sky's getting brighter in the windows and soon there'll be a little pink.

Peggy's still awake too. Only she's not in their bedroom, where the bed's untouched. She's back in the study and she's standing on the balcony and looking at the lake and not even shivering from that early morning chill that can drive deep into your bones.

Angie expects Peggy ought to be pacing and smoking, or staring at the shield, or maybe racing across the countryside to be by Steve's side.

But she's at the balcony just…musing.

Angie doesn't know what to say. Couldn't say anything even if she did know.

Her foot falls on some board in just the wrong way and it creaks and even though Peggy probably heard her coming up the stairs now any chance of them both pretending Angie's not in the room is gone. Peggy whips around and those eyes of her are as dark as Angie's ever seen 'em.

She's spent a lot of nights and days trying to sort out Peggy Carter. The woman's a spy—a spy **master** and she's damn good at concealing just about everything. A girl only gets a glimpse of who she is on account of Peggy **wanting** her too.

So when she doesn't—when she's had a rough day at work or a bad mission somewhere else Angie's had to learn how to see through all that careful armor built up to read the lady underneath.

And it's hard. Especially in times like this one when Peggy's gone so deep into her own head Angie's like to need a crane to pull her out.

But when Peggy whips around to look at her with dark and impossible to read eyes she leans back and her good hand grabs the rail and her knuckles go all white from how tight she's holding it.

She's not saying anything. Putting up a shield as potent as any Captain America could use. But that hand on the rail.

That's all a big scaredy cat like Angie needs to know what **she** ought to do.

And what she does is cross all that big looming space between them and cup the back of Peggy's head and pull her into a kiss. A long and loud kiss. The kind that has her pressing to Peggy like the world's all cold and she's the only warmth. Breathing through her nose and then her mouth and doing everything she can to keep touching Peggy and keep breathing too.

And Peggy. She responds. After what seems like minutes but what must only be seconds that hand stops holding the rail and slides across Angie's cheek and holds her still so Peggy can kiss back and kiss back proper.

Then she's pushing on Angie, guiding her back until she's got to hold onto the couch arm so she doesn't flip over onto the couch itself. She leans into wandering lips that trail down her neck and sighs at that hand that's found her waist and is splayed across it.

Then maybe she moans.

No. There's no maybe about it. Peggy nips and Angie moans and the spell all woven real quick is broken. The hand's still on her waist but now it's just resting there and Peggy's still pressed real close. But she's stopped kissing.

Just panting now. And not looking at Angie.

At least Angie thinks she isn't. She can't look at her. She's stuck looking up at the ceiling as that's where she was looking when she moaned and she's worried that if she looks anywhere else—if she **moves**—than the last bit of the spell will be all gone and she'll be alone.

Then Peggy's fingers are at the zipper of Angie's dress and she's pulling it down and Angie's stepping out of it and Peggy's not looking at **her**. She's kissing her way down Angie's front and very much invested in that. In carefully dragging Angie's underwear down and ignoring her stockings and burying her face between Angie's legs and—

For a while Angie's just all sensations. All feeling Peggy's tongue and fingers and hot breath. Her own hands have to keep hold of the couch so she doesn't fall and even that's just instinct.

Her eyes are closed and she's muttering "Oh God" like a mantra.

That's when it all goes wrong. She opens her eyes and looks down and one hand's flying off the couch to comb through Peggy's hair but she's opened her eyes see? She's looked down and she's opened her eyes. So she sees the way Peggy's looking up at her, mouth between her thighs. She sees the way she's watching her with—with **reverence**.

And the thing is Angie's grown accustomed to this particular look. She's a god damned movie star. She's got an Oscar and has worked with some of the greatest directors and actors working. She goes to premieres and she sees this look. She shakes the hand of fans and she sees it.

Like they're trying to commit every damn second of the meeting to memory. Like it's something so important they never want to forget it.

She's accustomed to the look, but never from **Peggy**. Peggy looks at her with love and affection and sometimes anger, but never like this.

Angie sobs.

Sobs and comes all at once and it is awful. Peggy climbing up her and dropping gentle kisses on her shoulder, cheek, then lips can't even help.

It's only that ardent kiss that tastes like herself that gets her to stop.

Her limbs are as rubbery as old tires and Peggy moves her so she's lying on the couch. She doesn't stop touching Angie. Hand in her hair. Ghosting across her skin.

Doesn't stop touching Angie until she does. Until she's up and gone.

Downstairs a car roars to life.

Outside the sun's up and the sky is pink.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

He's been beaten up and given a wedgie in front of a date and it wasn't nearly as emasculating as being drugged—repeatedly—by a seventeen year old girl.

Her being a trained assassin did nothing to help with the emasculation—even though it should have. And it's not that she's a girl either. Steve has a healthy respect for women who can lay a man out.

It's the **kid** part. This girl who will one day be the Black Widow is young enough that she should still be in school. But here she is coolly filling a syringe with her back to him and humming some Russian folk song about berries.

There's no gun around, or any other kind of weapon, so all Steve can do, when he comes to earlier than she probably thought he would, is sit up and hope he's intimidating enough to stay her hand or fast enough to stop her.

"Stick me again and we're gonna have problems," he says.

The way she locks up tells him she didn't hear him wake up.

"How about you put the syringe down?"

She looks over her shoulder and her eyes are more frantic than his Nat's would be. She hasn't quite learned to possess that cool calm that makes the future her such a force. "You're not armed."

"No, but I guarantee I'm faster than you, so put it down."

"Would she?"

"Who?"

"The me you know."

It's the first time the two of them have had a chance to discuss it—the future—and Steve's not quite sure what to say.

So he opts for the truth because his Nat's always respected that about him. "No."

She tenses up like she's gonna pounce.

"But she's also got sixty years of experience you don't have. She stands a chance. Pretty sure you don't."

"I got you twice already," she challenges.

They both know that was different so he doesn't even bother to say it. Just stares hard at those narrow shoulders until she wilts and puts the syringe down.

"Seeing as I'm not in some HYDRA or Leviathan facility I'm gonna assume knocking me out wasn't part of your mission."

"I'm on break right now Rogers. No ops except the ones **I** run." She juts out her chin when she says it. Defiant and proud and so damn young.

So damn sheltered.

"So what, you just thought I was more fun unconscious?"

"Angie needed time. Keeping you out gives it to her."

Angela Carter again. The nexus of this whole time traveling adventure. Stark's godmother, Peggy's best friend and something critical to this girl in front of him.

Steve knows Angela Carter too. But like he knows James Dean or Marilyn Monroe or Grace Kelly.

"Who is she," he asks.

She raises an eyebrow, "They don't have movies in 2015?"

"I mean to you. You've never struck me as a fangirl."

She's confused by the term he picked up from Sam, but smart enough to figure it out, and cautious enough not to just spill her reasons. "She's not a spy or a soldier."

It's an easy excuse, but, "She can't be the first civilian you've met."

"She's the first one to think there's something good in me." There it is. His Nat. Just for a second. "Even if she's wrong."

The self-loathing is palpable. Steve stands and feels bad when Nat recoils and reflexively reaches for the syringe. "She's not wrong," he says gently, and he tries to make his bulk smaller. "You'll figure that out one day."

####

It's a lot of insistence on his part, but Steve eventually convinces Nat to take him to everyone else. They have to walk because Tony took the car Angela Carter left them and he's not going to go with Nat's plan to just steal a new one.

The sun is high over head and it's as warm as northern Italy can ever get by the time Angela Carter's villa's in sight.

"Is that her name," Steve asks, because the coincidence of it is nagging at him.

Nat glances at him and doesn't even consider hiding her amusement. "I would tell you if you gave me even a hint of what you're talking about."

"Angela Carter. Is that really her name?"

"Why wouldn't it be?"

"Because it's odd that she'd be friends with Peggy and they'd have the same last name."

Nat leaps up onto a fence running along the road and theatrically balances herself like she's at her first gymnastic lesson—arms held out wide. "Maybe they're relations."

"Relations? Where'd you learn English? The Deep South?"

"Soviet Russia, from a man that beat you if you didn't enunciate your W's right."

It's not just how young this Nat is. It's how raw. Angry. **This** Nat is one he wants to hug. One he wants to protect.

But he's not going to tell her that. He unbuttons his jacket and slips his hands into his trouser pockets. "So **are** they relations?"

She balances on one toe. As perfect a pointe as a girl could manage in regular shoes. "What do you think?"

"Than it's coincidence?"

"Nope. Angie's real last name is Martinelli. Old Italian family from the south side of Brooklyn—"

"I remember the Martinellis. Used to cushion their knuckles with my face." The Martinelli boys were uniquely gifted at punching Steve. From grade school up into high school.

He remembered when they all left school to be bank robbers. How loud and proud they were with their new life of crime. "Gonna be something," they'd crow.

Then one of them died and another lost his leg and people in South Brooklyn stopped talking about them so much.

Nat leaps of the fence very lithely, with a flip thrown in for flourish and nods at the front door of the house he presumes everyone else is sitting in. "Yeah apparently her family has a 'reputation.' I think that and how 'ethnic' her last name sounded had her bosses pressuring to change her name."

"So she just happened to choose Carter?"

Nat leans on the bell and grins at him, "Pretty sure she chose it to tweak Peggy."

He frowns. "Why?"

On the other side of the door he can hear someone shouting "coming" and feet slapping on tile.

"Because they slept together and then Peggy left her."

Something short circuits in Steve's brain.

The door flies open and an unruffled, gorgeous, sleek and only mildly surprised Angela Carter looks from Steve to Nat and back again. "Steve Rogers," Nat says with pride, "meet Angie Martinelli, Peggy Carter's girlfriend."

####

Angie doesn't recall ever murdering a person, but she's pretty sure she might any second now.

Her day has been bad. Her girlfriend has disappeared to lick her wounds and brood like she's Robert Mitchum in one of his lousy flicks, and Howard Stark's metal expert has shown up in the form of the very nice, but very inconvenient Maria Carbonell, whom Tony Stark stares at like she's more Mary.

As in Virgin? Whatever is going on it's **weird**.

Worse, Angie hasn't had a chance to shower yet so she keeps thinking she smells.

And now Steve Rogers is standing on her doorstep and staring at her with a rightly warranted mix of confusion and anger while Natalie preens like a cat bringing home a dead bird.

Natalie's the one Angie'd like to murder in this case. Not for the preening—but more for the inconveniencing Angie with all the messy emotional fallout of the revelation they've all been avoiding saddling poor Steve Rogers with.

Revelation. Like her and Peggy sharing a bed is something biblical.

While near every part of her is fumbling over words and thoughts the one bit of her, trained out there in Hollywood, takes control. Opens the door and asks if he'd like to come in. Voice doesn't waver. Is deep and mature and the exact intonation she uses with fans and press.

He's breathing hard and trying to tamp down on a swell of emotion Angie can only guess at. But he steps inside, "Thanks," he says and it comes out a growl through gritted teeth.

Natalie gives her a finger wave and dances out of the storm with a smile.

Angie wants to reach out and touch Steve Rogers. Console him somehow. She opens her mouth to say something but the way his jaw is clinched keeps her from talking.

"Nat says you're from South Brooklyn—Red Hook?" His voice is even and high.

"Sure. Creeker." That's what all the kids living nearer the Canal called themselves as a way to separate themselves from the rest of Red Hook.

He shakes his head, "Hooker." So he was that rest of Red Hook. Down closer to the docks. "I used to know your brothers, I think. The Martinelli boys?"

"Cousins. And sorry. They were kind of—"

"Assholes."

She winces, because she can only guess what he would have had to put up with from her cousins. Especially if he looked anything like that picture Peggy has of a scrawny breathless kid who liked to draw.

"Basically."

"Are they still around or—"

"Still alive." She blinks. "I think. I don't much keep up with the Martinelli side of things now days. Not great for business."

"Probably not." He's got his head tilted up and is looking down his nose at her. **Appraising** her. Judging her or trying to figure out if she's good enough for Peggy or just thinking of the easiest way to pop her head like a grape.

"Peggy's out," she says. "I uh—honestly I thought she'd be with you."

"She isn't."

If there'd been a clock in that foyer the ticking from it would have been deafening.

"Do you want something to drink or to see Tony or—"

"I thought she was married," he says quickly. "Where I'm—I just assumed she was married—is married."

Okay this is a little safer. Maybe. Angie's really ready for the day to be done. "She was," she says, "Daniel Sousa. He's with the CIA and as nice as—"

"But he left her?" There's something in the way he says it. Like he's hopeful. Or maybe ready to judge. Or all of it and in between.

"Other way around." She twirls both her hands. "She looked me up after we hadn't seen each other in a while and…" Angie doesn't actually want to go into details so she just shrugs.

And Steve Rogers is an artist, and that means he's got enough of an imagination that he can just nod.

They try small talking some more but its excruciating. Especially because Angie keeps having to stop herself from apologizing for dating Peggy. She feels like she ought to. Like she's "Steve's girl" and Angie went and stole her while he slept.

But then she's "Peggy's girl." She's spent more years in the same bed as Peggy than Peggy and Steve even knew each other (at least she's pretty sure she has).

She's got no reason to apologize.

Doesn't stop her from wanting to.

Doesn't stop him from giving little looks like he's expecting her too.

"You know," she finally says, "she's always missed you like crazy." Not an outright apology, but good enough she figures.

####

It's Maria Carbonell, hapless and unknowing Maria Carbonell, who saves her. She waltzes into the foyer with a weird looking jeweler's magnifying visor perched on her head and Tony Stark's watch clutched in her hand.

Her mouth is running a mile a minute spouting off fancy science terms in that broad Chicago accent that's gotta be a cover for whatever her native speak is. She must think Angie's alone because when she spies Steve she seizes up like an engine that's not been lubed right.

"Maria," Angie says, suddenly a hostess in times of great discomfort. "This is Steve—"

"Rogers," she whispers. "I grew up during the war. Would know your face anywhere." She's got a crooked smile that's oddly familiar.

He nods politely, but clearly isn't comfortable with the look she's giving him. Angie figures the guy must live on nothing but humble pie and spinach.

Maria doesn't ask how a dead man is standing in the foyer conversing like his world didn't end in 1945. She holds the watch up again and beckons Angie over. Starts explaining how it works in something Angie supposes is English.

Steve asks if it's okay if Maria looks at it and she waves him off.

After he's gone, mumbling something about finding Tony, Maria tells her, "Your friend Tony said I could play with it all I want as long as I didn't take pictures or notes." She jokes about having Angie do it instead and then flushes and says something about how silly that'd be.

They figure the best thing to do is to break it apart and try to put it back together again. Maria flips when Angie pulls her out into her garage for proper tools.

"Looks like something out of Stark R&amp;D," she exclaims.

And Angie works hard not to be offended. She worked her rear end off to supply her garage and made darn sure it was **nothing** like what Howard would do.

For a little while the two of them descend down a rabbit hole of tech.

Or Maria does.

Angie focuses more on the supercharger she's picked up recently and is planning on putting in a car she hasn't even bought yet.

The silence that goes on between them is real comfortable and easy. And when either of them talks the other gets what they're saying. It's…nice.

Like Angie's got a friend. Which is something she hasn't really had in a good long while and has sorely missed.

Girlfriends and teenage assassins just can't compare.

But she's so easy and comfortable that when Maria asks about Peggy Angie answers honestly instead of playing with lies like she ought to.

"Is she your girlfriend," Maria asks real casual, peering at the back of the watch.

"Going on three years."

Maria just nods like she's watching baseball and someone's made a solid play. Angie, on the other hand, freezes.

That's when Maria looks over the edge of her little fancy glasses. "You supposed to just…tell people that?"

Angie swallows. "Probably not?"

She nods again. "How does it—" she turns around, then she catches herself, and then whatever goes through her head is enough to give her the courage to ask, "how does it work?"

Angie'd be offended on top of mortified but Maria's wrinkling her nose like she's just asked a friend what it's like to give a hand job.

So she laughs.

"Because I get bored enough as is with guys. I can't even imagine if they had the same parts—"

"Well," she's still chuckling, "it works really well."

"And the guy that's supposed to be Captain America out there. Is he like a kink…?"

Oh good God. Angie buries her head in her hands. "Nope," she groans, "real thing."

"He's supposed to be dead though."

"He's back—wait. You thought he was some kind of kinky sex thing?"

Maria clearly feels **she's** the one thought ought to be offended. "How am I supposed to know! You're famous! She's some kind of bigwig from Washington. **And** you're both queer as a three dollar bill. Who knows what your kind get up to."

Angie sucks on her teeth, "Kind?"

"The point is…Captain America's alive huh? That's crazy."

"Yeah…"

"The way you two were standing when I came in…you weren't his girl before were you?"

"No. That'd be Peggy."

She winces in sympathy. "Stole an American Hero's gal. That'll paint you worse in the rags than that commie charge ever did."

"You didn't even know who I was last time we met. Suddenly you're an expert?"

She flushes, "I…I researched."

"…Me?"

"Yeah you! Big fancy movie star comes and talks to me? And she's not all hoity toity? Course I'm gonna look you up."

"That why you're the one Howard sent for help even though your expertise is in cars? Wanted to look me up?" Is she…did she just accidentally flirt with a Stark engineer?

Maria shakes her head. "That came from higher up. Honestly I'm as surprised as you are they sent me."

Later on Angie's gonna look back on this particular moment in the conversation and wish she'd asked for more details. Like the inquisitive girlfriend of a spy ought to. But in the moment she's so busy worrying about accidentally flirting that she doesn't press Maria to figure out why exactly they sent a Stark Industries engineer when SHIELD's got dozens of their very own.


	9. Chapter 9

One of the very few things Angie has learned from having a spymaster girlfriend is that a lot of the spy game is waiting. When they'd arrived in Italy Peggy and Natalie had both cast their little spy webs and looked at her with matching smiles of vague condescension and told her to be patient.

She didn't point out that **they** were the ones here to hunt HYDRA. **Her** job was exclusively entertainment focused thank you very much.

Only with Peggy disappeared to God knows where and two time travelers sitting by the pool waiting to be pointed in the direction of some villain to punch it was all on a seventeen year old girl to find the bad guys.

After a very late lunch Natalie had rolled out of her chair in the dining room and announced her need to go to work. She said it very grimly and very casually so all of them—older than her by a decade at least—would take her seriously. Then Steve offered to go with her and she gave him a withering glare and said she worked better alone.

Maria Carbonell was either disturbingly nonplussed by Natalie's departure or one of those absent-minded types Angie had always thought only showed up in pictures. She waved Natalie's departure off and went back to the watch.

In retrospect magic watches from the future probably trumped over-serious girls on a mission.

She broke it and put it back together again and bounced all her ideas off Angie. Being barely literate in the subjects Maria was discussing Angie could only nod and struggle to follow along.

At one point Maria praised her "really stupid" questions. "They make me look at it all differently" she said with an earnest crooked grain.

Tony comes back in later in the early evening—when the sun's gotten so heavy it's getting dragged down to the horizon—and sort of…meanders over. His hand are stuck in his pockets and his shirt sleeves are rolled up and he hasn't brushed his hair in a while so it keeps falling in his eyes. Between that and the bruises and cuts from his run ins with Angie and Peggy he looks like a banged up gangster. The stench of martinis wafting off him doesn't do anything to discourage the image.

Maria just glances at him, nods, and goes back to work. "Thanks future boy," she says. Angie's not real clear on if Maria gets that he's actually from the future. She's not even sure how she'd ask that question without sounding like a loon. But seeing as Maria's playing with a watch from the future and non-plussed by the dead guy in the other room Angie's gonna assume she wouldn't care even if she did understand.

But Tony Stark of **the** Starks—Tony looks at Angie. **Begs** her with big wide eyes. Looks younger than he definitely is.

Angie's got this feeling, down in her gut, that Maria Carbonell is maybe important to him.

She notices how close she and Maria are sitting and how well they've clicked and her head goes to Tony's hands lacing together down by the pool when he told her about his mom.

Her eyes flicker from Tony to Maria and back again and he nods and there's all this—this **stuff** there. Big and heavy and suffocating if you can see it.

She doesn't want to. Doesn't want any of this. American heroes and families reunited and the soap opera that is all their world.

That's what she gets for falling for a spy.

She takes a breath and invites Tony over and he's so damn polite and eager and quiet with the two of them that she almost doesn't recognize him from the man she thought she maybe knew.

####

Tony finds the guitar in the back of her closet full of engine parts. He parades it into the kitchen where she and the **sane** people have finished dinner and are tackling the dishes.

Steve raises an eyebrow and asks who owns it and Angie mumbles something about how it came with the house (she will tell no one that she's been trying to learn to broaden her skill set).

Tony insists its hers and Maria asks if she knows any songs in this guileless way that Angie can't figure out. And then Tony just says **yes**. Goes off on songs she's heard of and songs that probably haven't been written yet and says, "She's not really known for it, but Angie's got a gift."

He looks at her with the kind of pride her brother might look at her with if she wasn't so dang insistent on living with a woman.

Steve just looks like a soldier who ate something in the mess that didn't agree with him.

Maria gives her a big goofy toothy grin and bangs out a quick and steady beat on the countertop with her hands. "Play us something," she implores. Her rhythm is good and her hands are still wet with suds and make a noisy slap on the countertop.

Tony forces the guitar into her hands and implores her. Slides over next to the woman that's got to be his future mother and takes up playing the same beat in tandem like he's done it dozens of times before.

The two of them look so related it hurts.

Angie waves them off and then Maria makes a noise like a big stand up bass. "Come on, this one's easy," she says in between bum bum bums.

Angie wants to thwack her with the guitar.

"I'm—" She huffs because what the **heck**! She's not a monkey. She doesn't just play on command. "I'm not playing—especially not something some rockabilly fella plays."

"This is a great one," Tony shouts over the den of their beating on the counter and when Angie looks to Steve for help he shrugs those big shoulders of his.

So she handles the guitar like she's seen real players do and her fingers find the strings and arch to play the cords and suddenly she's really strumming some rockabilly boy's song just like she saw him play when she was stuck in Memphis for a night.

She sings too, because she knows the words, and she can't stop. Not when Tony Stark is smiling like a boy at Christmas and Maria is grinning from the sheer pleasure of it and even Steve's looking less pained than before.

Angie's always been good at learning things fast. It's what got her ahead when she finally landed on Broadway and it's why she does her own dancing and rides her own horses in her pictures.

She just never figured she'd be able to learn **this** fast. To pick up a guitar and know how to play. Maybe it's because it's so simple a song. There's not much to it and Maria's doing the harder work, beating out the percussion and keeping bad time with her play at being a stand up bass.

Tony catches her eye and she thinks she might die from the nostalgic kind of joy that brightening up all his features.

Then her eyes wander as she's playing and her finger skips a cord.

Because Peggy's back and she's standing in the doorway looking like she's seen a ghost. Which could be expected if she were looking at Steve—his back still to her. But he's as oblivious as the rest of them to Peggy being back.

She's looking at Angie. Watching how Angie plays the guitar with confidence and looking like she might just throw her guts up right there on the rug at the sight.

Then her eyes flicker to Steve and she goes paler still. Angie's fingers stumble again. Steve goes all rigid because he just **knows**. Maybe it's her playing or maybe it's showing on her face or maybe he's just got some kind of sixth sense when it comes to Peggy.

There's a beat in the song. One that last for days in Angie's head but has gotta be much shorter in real life. Just this moment where Angie's watching Peggy and Peggy's watching Steve and Steve's doing his damnedest not to turn around and see her. The love of the guy's life is ten feet away and all he's gotta do is **turn**.

Only when he does Peggy's already out of the room.

####

Angie follows Peggy. Because they're together and sometimes Angie's upset and Peggy trails after her and sometimes its the other way around. And because Steve doesn't know how. As much as they were—are—to each other they can't seem to figure out how to be in the same room. So she tells him she'll talk to Peggy and she climbs the stairs and wonders what the heck she's supposed to say to the woman she loves.

Is she supposed to tell her to go to him? She doesn't **actually** want that to happen. She wants to fight for what she and Peggy are and tell the time traveller to hitch a ride back and not to let 1955 hit his ass on his way out.

But she's not gonna ignore what Peggy felt and maybe still feels. There's a reason the upstairs hall of their home is lined with his art and there's a reason she gets melancholic every year on the day his plane went down.

When she comes into their bedroom Peggy's waiting for her with her arms wrapped around herself. "Didn't know you played guitar," she says and her eyes are watery.

"Fast learner."

"You learn a lot of things quickly these days."

She ignores that comment because Peggy's right but Angie doesn't have the time or energy to think about that. Not when there are bigger fishes. "You know when you high tailed it out of here this morning I thought you were going to see him."

"Whatever gave you that—"

"Because you just **left** Peggy. Kissed me on the couch and **left**." She at least looks embarrassed. "And he's the love of your life and—"

"Oh will you stop saying that," she spits. "Stop telling me whom I do and do not love! We may sleep together on the regular but don't presume to know what I'm thinking."

"You love him don't you?" Angie sounds snappish and she knows it.

"Of course I do—"

"Then what's the big—"

"I love you too! Madly." She collapses onto the bed and has to hold herself up with her hands. Peggy's got these gorgeous shoulders that are a little broader than what's fashionable but they're all sloped inward when she sits like that. "I love you, and I love him and I can't just turn it off."

Angie fidgets with her own hands. She wishes she has something in them.

"He's not supposed to be alive." Its a whisper Peggy would probably never admit to uttering to anyone else.

"I know," Angie says. Because when she's all alone she's thought it too.

She's looking up at the ceiling, or maybe the mirror. Just not at Angie. "I got so very good at mourning him." She smiles and it's that soft one that Angie teases her about because it's all at odds with the fancy and scary spy master. "Wizard at it in fact."

"Guess he ruined your plans huh?"

"Just a little," she sniffs and there's tears that Peggy doesn't want to shed and that she has to wipe away. "Did he tell you how he survived or—"

"We didn't really chat about that. Just know he's from the future."

"Right. Steve Rogers, the Once and Future Captain America. What does that make me? Guinevere? Lancelot?" She groans again. "God, that's bleak."

"I'd say I was one of 'em but I've never met the guy before. And to be fair to both of us, he crashed a plane into an ocean in 1945. It wasn't you making him crazy jealous by carrying on with his best friend."

Peggy glares at her because that's pretty close to the plot of that awful Captain America movie she was in.

Then lets herself fall back on the bed. Angie thinks to still stand but Peggy pats the mattress beside her so Angie lays down.

"You know when he was first gone I used to fantasize about him coming back?"

Of course she would. When Peggy up and faked her death Angie did the same thing.

She tents her hands over her stomach. Sounds all thoughtful like the impulsive and in the now Peggy never does. "I built scenario after scenario of a life the two of us would lead. Fixing the SSR and rooting out HYDRA and then settling down…on a farm."

Angie sits up on her elbows, "What—like with chickens?"

Peggy shrugs. "Steve has always seemed like the chicken sort."

"As a fellow kid from Brooklyn I'm gonna disagree. None of us like chickens." She lays back down. The ceiling is really too fancy for her. A mural of clouds and stars that some rich count or lord or something had painted fifty years ago. "But go on."

"You and Steve did grow up near each other didn't you?"

"Apparently my cousins used to beat on him."

"From what I understand half of South Brooklyn used Steve as a punching bag," she says wryly. "He was a bit scrappy back then." The mattress shifts because now Peggy's looking at Angie. Studying her in that old inscrutable way of hers.

"Gonna tell me I'm scrappy too?" It's a half joke and it tugs at Angie's lips.

Stupid Peggy has to just smile sadly. "He's not supposed to be alive."

No jokes. "But he is."

"Why aren't you more angry?"

Angie shrugs and is real proud of how she doesn't even cry. "I figure," she has to swallow. Collect all those emotions that just want to bust out of her. "I figure if I'd gone straight and married some fella after you 'died' and then you'd still showed up in that bathroom telling me I was wonderful? I figure I'd still be here on this bed." She looks at Peggy and doesn't flinch even as she's met with those dark, dark eyes. "You're everything to me Peggy, but Steve Rogers? He's **your** everything."

"You're wrong." It's a challenge instead of the admission she wishes it was.

"I don't think I am."

Peggy's jaw goes all tight like when she's about to lay a fellow out with her fist. "You are."

But Angie's seen things. Read between all those lines drawn by the three of them. "You haven't talked to him once Peggy." Not once. "If you were so sure of the two of us you wouldn't be lying on this bed with me."

She'd have seen him, addressed what could have been and moved on. But Peggy only ever runs when she's too scared, too wrecked, to stay.

A warm and perfect hand finds Angie's and she thinks this easy contact might be what she'll miss the most. "He's not a temptation Angie. Or a challenge."

"I know. He's the one that got away, and if you don't go and catch him we'll both regret it."

She pulls her hand out of Peggy's.


	10. Chapter 10

He turns around to tell Angie that he appreciates her hospitality and concern, but he really needs to be alone right now.

That's his plan. He's come outside to stand on the shore of the lake and stare up at the moon and all he wants is to clear his head and not think about 1955.

Bucky's alive and needs to be saved.

Howard Stark hasn't been murdered yet.

There's important political leaders that don't have to be assassinated.

And the most incredible woman in most of time and probably a lot of space is in the house and up the stairs. The woman of his dreams. His meant to be when he's romantic and silly and watching sappy movies no one but Sam knows he watches.

It's 1955 and he could do more in one week here then in all his time in 2015. Only he can't do any of it. Tony's lectured him on time and space and pointed out all the lives he would destroy just to save ones already lost.

"Think of it as a trip," Tony told him on the bus to Milan. "Here and gone and that's it." He smiled at him before covering his face with his hat like he was going to take a nap even though he sleeps less than five hours a night. "Just enjoy the vacation Rogers."

So he's standing on the shore of this lake and sucking in big lungfuls of air that taste like nothing 2015 could ever provide and trying to enjoy the lousiest trip he's been on. And he's been to HYDRA bases where they experimented on people he loves.

That's what Angie's walking in on.

At least he thinks it's Angie. She's got a careful way of walking that's a lot like Peggy's and when he hears those soft and careful steps on the stones and then on the grass he just assumes.

Which makes an ass out of you and me.

Because he turns around to tell her to beat it and finally gets to see her.

Bright lipstick. Dark eyes. Her.

Not aiming a gun or twenty feet below him backstage. Standing five feet away and glowing in the moonlight and everything Steve Rogers ever thought he needed.

There's just a little dip between the yard and the shore. Which means that for the first time since 1942 she's taller than him.

The wind catches in her hair. The skirt of her dress.

Steve swallows because he knows anything out of his mouth is going to be so melodramatic Peggy will roll her eyes.

She's always said he's too dramatic.

She's the one that finally speaks. After staring at him with watery eyes and a jaw set in stone. "You've cut your hair."

He does something between a laugh and a sigh. "It's the style." He runs his hand through it. It's shorter than he's ever had it—even as a kid. Nat was the one that suggested it. "Guess they like it short in 2015."

"You look fresh out of boot camp. Or like one of those little boys with ringworm."

"It's not that bad." Why can't he stop smiling? And why does it have to be such a half-hearted smile. Self-deprecating. "Your hair's gotten longer."

He takes a step up the hill.

Peggy swallows. Shakes her head just like another Peggy did in 2012. "I've gotten older too." She frowns.

"You don't look it." He can just see it in her eyes. And maybe because her hair is longer—and she's a little leaner. Harder. But still—still she looks the same. She's Peggy.

"It's been—" she swallows again and her hands fly up to wrap around her middle. "It's been ten years, Steve."

"Sorry I'm late."

####

Angie wonders what they're talking about out there by the lake. Wonders it as she sits on the floor and presses her back against the bed and refuses to cry. Martinellis don't cry. especially over something like a girl.

She hears footsteps in the hall and she hugs the pillow she's got and presses her face into it and hopes whoever is out there keeps on walking.

But the footsteps stop and she hears Maria sigh. "Oh sweetheart," she says and then there's a spindly arm taking hold of her and forcing her into a hug she really really needs.

They don't say anything.

Maria just holds her and Angie just lets her.

####

They walk together along the shore. They don't touch. They haven't touched. But Steve's aware of every swing of her hand. It wouldn't be so hard to take it in his. To pull her close. To finally have all those moments they waited too long for.

His hand curls into a fist so he doesn't do something he actively needs to.

"What's the future like," Peggy asks, and she's glancing at him without turning her head.

He shrugs. "Loud."

"Loud?"

"And more fried stuff. Lot less boiled…stuff."

"So…better?"

He laughs.

"The White Sox ever win again?"

"2005."

She scoffs, "Of course."

"I wasn't there though. Still asleep."

The shores of Lake Como are made of fine gravel and it crunches under their feet.

"Was it—" She shakes her head, "I shouldn't ask."

He wants her to ask.

Peggy takes a breath. "Was it HYDRA?"

"No."

"So we…find you?"

"SHIELD does." He hopes she catches the difference.

"But not me?" She has.

They've stopped walking and Peggy's head is tilted down. There's all this—this shame there. Sags shoulders usually broad and held back with purpose.

"No," he says softly. He wants to put a hand on her shoulder. His hands are big and her shoulder's small enough. The curve of it would fit just right in the palm of his hand.

"If I'd—we thought—until the last few days," Something in her voice cracks and Steve's channelling all that willpower people say he has to not take her in his arms, "I thought you died Steve."

He bites his cheeks. The coordinates he was found at rattle off in his mind. "I'm just—on ice Peggy. Like in a fridge."

Her laugh is bitter. Then— "Am I still—"

"I talk to you at least once a week. You like to tell me I'm being over dramatic."

She nods as if that's a given. "And I'm old."

A hairdresser comes in once every week and styles her hair. But the caregivers wash it a few days later and sometimes he comes in and she's putting it up herself with neat and irritated efficiency and sometimes its lank and clings to her skull and she smiles sweetly up at him as he does his best to make it look nice.

She tilts her face up and the moonlight catches in her hair and Steve's fingers itch to draw. "Do you know much about time travel?"

He knows next to nothing.

"I've been briefed on it—as director of SHIELD. You and Tony in there aren't—there've been others."

"Who?"

She shakes her head and Steve struggles not to reel. "I have…protocols I'm to follow. People to contact. Actions to take. Quarantines to put in place."

He's suffered quarantine before. Stuck in an all white room while people in masks say nothing.

"As I understand it the very act of trespassing in the past corrupts your present and all our futures."

She's lecturing—Steve smiles. Of course. He travels sixty years back in time and Peggy lectures him for doing it. Like they're in a briefing and any moment Colonel Phillips will tell her to ease off.

She presses on and her words a little rushed. She's a just a little short of breath. "But the only thing I can think about—what keeps running through my head despite everything—everything—is that I want to ask where you are."

He knows those coordinates by heart. They're rattling through his head in the moment. Sometimes, if he's having a rough day and needs to sleep her chants them. Over and over and over again.

Like counting sheep.

Peggy's excruciatingly wistful. "But you'd never tell me if I asked."

He'd tell her in an instant.

"You'd never ask," he says.

She wouldn't. Because Peggy is the kind of righteous Steve aspires to be and because there's right and wrong and Peggy has a more nuanced grasp of that then anyone.

And tampering with time is wrong. Aggressively and appallingly wrong.

She ducks her head again, "I wouldn't."

"I—" Why do they have to be the good ones? The honorable ones? Why do they have to save the world and do what's right when everyone else can be so awful. "I want to tell you anyways."

She looks at him then and the moon's in her eyes and they're so sharp and focus it's painful.

Peggy Carter doesn't cry.

"You won't."

Acutely aware.

That's what he is.

If Steve had this kind of awareness on the battlefield he'd never lose a fight. He knows where every part of Peggy is in relation to himself. Knows she's taken just the smallest of steps towards him. That she's breathing just a little faster now. That her face is tilted just fraction further up.

He sees her lick her lips and he notices that her hands are all balled up at her sides just like his.

"I won't," he agrees softly. Even though he needs to. He needs to tell her. The numbers are beating a tattoo on his God damned brain. He needs to be with her. He needs the war to be over and he needs to go home. And Peggy is home.

It's been four years since he woke up and this is the first time the world felt right.

Her thumb brushes against his cheek. It's cool and rough and he leans into it. Closes his eyes. His fingers dig so hard into the palms of his hand he's sure there's blood.

"Steve." Her voice is soft and intimate and why did they have to wait? Why did they have to make some mute promise to wait? They could have had so much. Been so much. They could have been more than long looks and quick caresses. "Look at me."

He opens his eyes and as aware of her as he thought he was he was wrong. Because she's impossibly close now and her hand is still on his cheek and she's leaning up to press her lips to his.

And it will never be enough.

Ever. Ever. Ever.

But it is.

"It's all right," she whispers against his mouth and he realizes he's gone completely rigid. Her other hand finds his. Ghosts across his wrist. She draws it up towards her waist and he lets her.

He's missed her. He's missed even the possibility of her.

The chance.

She opens her mouth and his hand splays across the small of her back and it's enough. He's clumsy and she's sure and it might be all wrong but it feels perfectly right.

It's enough.

Then she's pulling back and pressing her forehead to his and her hand is playing with the hair at the nape of his neck. The kisses are featherlight. All the movies he's seen. All the girls he's fumbled with. None of them ever warned him about this. These featherlight kisses that are wet and taste like coffee and tobacco and feel like home.

If he told her where he was this wouldn't happen. At least—that's what a whole lot of science fiction tells him. He would disappear and there'd be another Steve Rogers and this Steve getting these featherlight kisses would be dead. Cause he never was. That other guy would get the chance for kisses and the pieces of Peggy that are soft and hard and that hand still on his cheek.

The war would be over for that guy. No Chitauri or Loki. Maybe no HYDRA. Living on a…on a farm. With chickens. And kids. And the war would be over.

Only it never is.

####

There are more footsteps on the stairs and Angie pulls herself out of Maria's arms and wipes at her eyes and opens her mouth to tell Tony she's fine.

She's touched that he's come up here. Really. And he could be a good distraction from the fact that her whole world is being pulled apart by his and Steve's need to save some future she's apparently not even in.

But the person standing in the doorway isn't Tony.

Tony's not so tall.

Tony doesn't walk around with a gun and rope.

Tony doesn't walk around dressed all in black with a balaclava covering his face.

She hears her own breath loud in her ear. Time gets awfully slow and her eyes connect with this fella who isn't Tony. A man maybe. Older with crow's feet around the eyes.

Eyes that are hard and cold and terrifying and have her thinking about a ship she spent a month on but that she can hardly remember.

She has to think fast. Faster than most people can move. She knows Peggy would probably take the guy on or leap out of the way and lure him in. But Angie's not a fighter. She's still got the pillow she'd been hugging earlier and she flings it at the door. It slams it shut and she pulls Maria up.

"Come on," she says, "we have to go."

She wedges a chair under the door before the man on the other side can get it open. The knob rattles and her heart is thumping against her chest so hard it nearly hurts.

"Now," she orders, and Maria nods with wide eyes. But she's pale like the dead. They don't have time but Angie takes both of Maria's hands in hers and looks up at her. "You okay?"

"Yeah—" but Maria's voice is a whisper and she's breathing hard. Like she's hyperventilating.

A foot or a shoulder—Angie can't be sure—connects with the door. It flexes. Bows.

"We gotta move." She yanks the window open, looks outside, and then slams it shut again. "But not that way."

There's a woman standing out there with a pleased as punch grin on her smug face and she's got another two guys like the one at the door. Just waiting.

Angie comes back to the door and snatches up the guitar she brought from downstairs. She looks at the chair holding the door in place and then back at Maria.

Maria mutely nods and takes a breath.

"It'll be okay," Angie says—even if she doesn't believe it. "Just run for the lake."

Maria nods again and yanks the chair out from under the door. The fella on the other side crashes through and Angie slams the guitar down onto his head. The impact rattles up her arms and her hands sting.

She shouts for Maria to go, but when she tries to follow the guy grabs her around the waist and pulls her back.

He smells like a whole lot of cologne. Enough to gag.

Her feet fly up to slam against the door frame.

Leverage.

She throws her head back and pushes against him and he grunts. Falls. Stars are in her eyes from impact. She keeps on going. Rolling backwards over him onto the bed.

He jumps to his feet and turns, rope off his belt and twisting in his hands. "Just give it up," he growls and his voice is laced with a German accent as thick as a milkshake.

It's all impulse that carries Angie. It moves up through her like a tremor. She puts all her weight on her shoulders and arms and presses into the mattress. Pulls her legs back toward her chest.

Leverage.

Then she launches herself forward—feet first. Her heels smash into his chest. She's thrown back into the bed by the force of the blow and uses it to propel herself again. Her legs latch onto his neck like she's a python from the zoo and she falls forward into a roll that flips him over her and into the wall in the hall.

He tries to stand and her hands fly. Fingers finding all the weak points her head doesn't even know about. He gurgles. Looks up at her with wide eyes.

"What—" he starts, and she whips around and sends him to the floor with a well placed kick to the temple she didn't know she was capable of.

The tremors are still moving through her. Flashes of not quite memory are bright in her brain. She shivers. Looks down at hands she didn't know were capable of—

"Maria," she breathes.

There's not time to think about whatever's happening at the edge of Angie's mind. There's just getting to Maria and Tony and getting outside. Getting to Peggy.

Doesn't matter how many crazy masked German sounding guys there are. Peggy'll keep her safe.

She rushes down the stairs and her bare feet squeak on slick tile. Maria's been tackled and trussed up like an animal on its way to the butcher. Tony is twitching on the ground. Two long sparking wires are jutting out of him and trailing up to a device in another masked man's hand.

And the woman has come inside.

"Ms. Carter it's such a pleasure. Love your work," she vamps.

Two of her goons—and they are clearly her goons—lunge for Angie and she does some kind of thing she's only seen in movies involving her elbows and knees and feet. They both go down.

The woman raises an eyebrow so black it's almost green. "You're ahead of schedule aren't you?" She sounds pleased.

Angie doesn't—she looks helplessly at Maria. The girl's eyes are wide. "I don't—"

The woman rolls her eyes. "Doesn't matter." She waves her hand like Angie's a fly buzzing around her head. "Take the shot."

That's when Angie sees that man at the window with a huge rifle aimed down toward the lake.

Towards Peggy.

She missed him coming in.

She's gotta stop him. Runs towards him. Reaches out.

One of the men on the ground lifts his arm. Out the corner of her eye she sees more of those long wires shooting out of device towards her.

No time.

Her foot connects with a glass paperweight on the coffee table. It hurts. Almost as much as when the wires latch onto her back and enough electricity to power Brooklyn courses through her.

The paperweight arcs through the air towards the gunman.

His finger's on the triggers.

Angie's falling.

Things are getting red and painful and hazy and—

The gun goes off.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

They burst apart at the crack of gun fire. Peggy scrambles for cover and Steve stands tall and looks for the gunman.

"Get down," Peggy urges in a harsh whisper.

Steve looks at the gouge in the ground. Judges the angle. Looks back towards the house. Towards—

"Angie," Peggy utters—thinking something similar.

There's a scream somewhere far away. A distant—faint—cry of Peggy's name.

And she's off. Dashing towards the house with zero regards for her own life. Steve's fast on her heels and then ahead of her. He clears the pool in a leap and doesn't have time to slow down at the windows looking out over the yard. He smashes through one and careens into the den.

Tony's twitching on the floor and feebly pulling out the lines from a taser. "They got my mom—" he grunts.

Steve can hear the gun of an engine and tires on soft road. He blows through the front door—the bulk of it flying off its hinges.

His chest is already heaving. Lungs sucking in oxygen to keep the blood supplying moving to muscles. He squints. Sees the lights of the van out on the road.

Runs.

He doesn't run this fast often and his lungs and legs are burning like they used to when he was a kid and had to just climb a set of stairs.

Sam's always telling him he's gotta run different. That his form makes him look more like a geriatric than his Facebook friends list ever could.

"Get more aerodynamic," he says. "Maybe loosen up a little."

Steve thinks Sam's got a form like someone out of the Olympics.

Steve tries mimicking that natural way Sam has of dashing around. He can feel the way it makes him faster. Even if parts of him are straining and protesting it.

'It's not natural,' all his muscles are whispering.

The back of the truck, a laundry truck with an Italian name painted along the side in gold paint, blows open and a HYDRA soldier hangs out and takes a shot at Steve. He dodges. Keeps running.

Dodges another shot.

And another.

He's slowing down and the truck isn't. He's running on air and super serum and adrenalin and all the truck needs is a driver with a heavy foot on the gas.

There's another car behind him. The light off its headlights giving him a long, dark shadow.

He glances at it as it jets by and he's not sure who he's expecting to see in the driver's seat.

That it's Peggy, her face screwed up in terse anger and concentration, is terrifying. He's seen that look before. Had it burned into his brain.

Peggy's not in a nice place.

The front of the car she's driving crashes into the back of the truck and he sees everyone inside get tossed around like ants shook up in a jam jar. The gunman falls out onto the hood of Peggy's car. Scrambles for purchase. Lunges at Peggy.

Like an idiot.

She shoots him. Because what the HYDRA soldier seemed to miss was that an angry Peggy Carter is one of the most dangerous creatures on the planet.

She rams the truck again and shoots into its hold. Bullets plink and the truck swerves like its driver's been shot. Peggy lets off the gas and then guns it again. Her bumper hits the truck just right. Sends it into a nasty roll off the road and down a grassy hill.

He's winded when he makes it to her, but he still reaches out and grabs her arm. "Peggy—"

Her eyes are on the truck and flicker only to the magazine of her pistol as she checks it. "They took Angie."

He knows. And he can only imagine what she's feeling.

They scramble down the hill together and when stragglers crawl out of the truck and take shots at them Peggy cleanly puts them down.

These aren't SHIELD agents turned HYDRA by propaganda and smart spycraft. These are the zealots that will keep the group alive over the next sixty years, and Steve has to say he's not sorry to see a few more of them go.

Peggy hisses when they reach the wreck. Her features are still hard. Cold and still like Steve's vibranium shield.

Because the only person left in the truck is Madame Hydra herself. Her hands are held up in surrender and she looks—of all things—**sheepish**.

Peggy's gun snaps up. "Where is she," she growls through gritted teeth.

Hydra just smiles cool as you please. "Shoot me and you'll never find out."

"More like shoot you and this whole problem goes away."

Peggy and Madame Hydra both look at Steve with eerily similar looks of confusion and surprise.

He nods back at Hydra. "I saw her just before we came here. Same woman, but much older than the woman in front of us."

Peggy frowns down mockingly at her, "I'm nearly positive colluding with your future self is a temporal paradox."

"I don't know about that. In the future I'm **very** smart."

"Not smart enough." Peggy aims the gun again and Steve has no doubt that if she pulls the trigger Madame Hydra is dead. "I kill you here and she no longer exists. The problem solves itself."

"She disappears and our men will kill your girlfriend."

She rolls her eyes. Actually **scoffs**. "And time could very well be a rubber band. Then you're dead and none of this ever happened."

"You sure?"

Peggy certainly looks it.

Madame Hydra's smile is like smoke curling up out of a flame. "Sure enough to risk her life?"

####

It was the cheapest damn ploy in the world. **The** oldest trick. One Angie herself had pulled off before using a paid off kid in a Model A and a wig. And Peggy had blustered out of the house like a god damn horsewoman of the apocalypse and missed the whole thing like a **rube**.

It was—is deeply disappointing.

She isn't gonna say she is ashamed of her girlfriend. It's just that if they both survive and Peggy doesn't walk into the sunset with the American Hero she has plans to never let her forget the time she peeled out of the house after a distraction van while Angie, all trussed up like Christmas dinner, watches from the bushes with a gun pressed to her temple.

The man with his knee pressed into her back starts to let up but the green haired so and so overseeing things shakes her head and he waits.

A few minutes later the other garage opens and Tony races out in Angie's brand new Ace she had just delivered over from England. If a barrel of a gun was growing warm against her skin she would have yelled after him to be careful.

Tony—apparently taking after his godmother—also fails to notice them in the bushes. **And** he turns the wrong way—driving straight off in the opposite direction from Peggy.

Or maybe not. If Peggy's on the road headed one way and Tony's going the other than there's no way another van can squeak past them to pick up Angie's own little group of hostages and HYDRA.

Angie's letting herself get used to that idea. Letting it blossom in her pleasantly.

Then the green haired lady is telling them to all head for the water and Angie's heart is sinking.

She and Maria get thrown onto a boat like they're sacks of potatoes and the HYDRA soldiers take the two of them down below deck and leave them crammed into a small space up close to the engine. It's dark and hot and smells like diesel and when the engine gets going it's so loud Angie can hardly hear herself think.

So she focuses on Maria. Because the other woman's clammy and cool and shivering like it's under thirty degrees when it's got to easily be over ninety in this hole.

She tries being soothing and stroking the bit of skin she can feel with her fingers and hands all bound up behind her. But Maria keeps on chattering her teeth and trembling like a leaf.

So Angie twists around until she's facing her and even though it's so dark she can't make out features she can still see the glistening of Maria's tears. Just running down her face.

The poor kid.

She scoots closer and presses her shoulder into Maria like a hug and her lips brush against a forehead all damp and tasting salty.

"It's okay," she murmurs.

The engine's still roaring but it's going on more like white noise. Loud static coming off a radio.

"Peggy'll find us."

"They're HYDRA," Maria hiccups. "HYDRA…Nazis…"

"I know."

She feels Maria shake her head. "You really don't."

Her breath is a little sour. And how close she is. The last few years she's only ever been this disheveled and close with Peggy.

Why'd she have to chase after the van?

Why couldn't she have just **known**. Why couldn't she be just behind this boat right now? Getting ready to sink it and take them both to safety and wrap Angie up in soft perfect arms and tell her "it's all right darling."

"I grew up with them," Maria whispers. "And I always said I'd die before I was stuck with them again."

"You won't be."

"You don't know that."

"I know Peggy. She's already sorting out how to save us. You'll see."

"Nice of you to have faith Angie." She shivers again. Sighs like a breath dragged out of dead lungs. "I wish I did too."

The poor kid is miserable and about two steps from dying of grief or going straight into hysteria.

Angie puts her cheek to Maria's and twines their legs together as best she can being all tied up and she hums a song. It's the first one that pops in her head. She sings it at the end of her act. She's on stage all alone and there's a black velvet curtain behind her sucking up all the light except that hot one shining down on her.

It's not written for her. It's out of a lousy musical they're turning into a picture. But everyone who hears it say she was meant to sing it. Folks come up to her in the club and ask what she's thinking about.

Who she's thinking about. Who's her particular stranger in paradise.

####

Peggy maintains eye contact, but finally, after a long and quiet moment, clicks the safety on. Madame Hydra's so pleased with that. Grinning like she's won a bet—

Peggy buffalos her into unconsciousness with the side of her gun. "That smugness was worse than sand in your knickers," she says—half in apology.

"I was kind of tempted to do it myself." She smiles and doesn't make a joke about him being too chivalrous to hit a woman.

Which just makes Steve want to kiss her again.

Which can't happen.

They kissed and Peggy's girlfriend was kidnapped. It's not quite cause and effect but it stings the same way.

Peggy stands back up right and stretches with an "oomph." Her hands bracing against the small of her back as she twists from side to side. "We should take her back to the house. Interrogate her proper."

"You think she'll give us anything?"

"Red Skull's right hand woman? Not on purpose. But she'll give us something."

"We should check the van too. They probably stole it, but if they didn't—"

"A nice fat HYDRA ring in my backyard."

"You couldn't know."

Her lips are pressed together so tightly they form a thin line so Steve doesn't push it. There's a time for heart to hearts and as much as Steve needs it to be now…it isn't the time.

####

He's not gonna say he's been walking around for the last four years carrying a very idealized version of Peggy in his head. While he'll admit (to Sam and a 2015 Nat only) that he's maybe romanticized her a little he still remembers Peggy for what she was—is.

One of the best damn soldiers and spies he's ever worked with.

They leave Hydra tied up in the trunk of the car. Peggy worries that she might still escape so Steve carefully balances the front end of another car on top of the trunk. "Hopefully it won't dent," he says.

"I'm sure it will buff right out."

They go inside and clean up the glass and Steve picks a room and gets it ready for the interrogation while Peggy makes more calls. Than they bring Hydra into a room and Steve rolls his shirtsleeves up past his elbows and stands in front of the door with his arms crossed and his biceps bulging and Peggy sits in a chair opposite Madame Hydra and just

stares.

She's thoughtfully put a clock in the room on a nightstand. It ticks and ticks and ticks. Steve does sketches in his head. Imagines rendering the scene in charcoal—his fingers turning black as he blends in shadows.

Madame Hydra's first words seem to bounce against the bare walls. "The silent treatment? That's your plan?"

Peggy's unreadable. Like one of the ciphers the Howling Commandoes had to use and only Bucky and Peggy ever seemed to understand. "Why Angie?"

She laughs. "Not going to ask me about the other one?"

"I've a good idea why your future self wants her. Why Angie?"

"I was surprised about the other one. Such poor taste—"

"Why Angie?"

"She cried when we caught her. Just constant shivering—"

Hydra's looking to get a rise out of one or both of them. Peggy's not taking the bait. "Why Angie?"

"And that name. Maria Carbonell. I bet English isn't that girl's first language."

"Why Angie?"

"Maybe…Ladino? Now in a den of Hydra loyalist. Many of them still with a few heils in their hearts."

That line sparks something in Steve and he has to flex to keep from doing something he'll regret. But Peggy sits there still cool like a cucumber. "Why Angie?"

And there it is. A chink in Madame Hydra's carefully constructed armor—fashioned out of spite and condescension. She snarls, "Because you ask!"

Peggy just tilts her head.

"You ask 'Why Angie.' You take her with you to Zurich and she takes you to Los Angeles. You destroy **my** world—my work for her. You live together. Dine together. **Breathe** for one another in the most sickening—" She smacks her hand against the table and it cracks like a bullet out of a gun. "You ask 'Why Angie'. **That** is why you don't have her."

Even in the face of that vitriol Peggy hasn't cracked. "Your work."

Hydra pales.

"I've been wondering who took up the cause. After I took Erskine from you. And Zola." Her smile is sweet and cloying like taffy warmed up in the sun on the boardwalk. She tilts her head. "So they're left with you." She looks her up and down like appraising art. "The lab assistant."

Steve doesn't think he's ever heard Peggy sound so patronizing. She's using it like a knife—and having had to deal with it enough herself she's **very** good.

Madame Hydra's gaze flickers to him and back to her. "Says the triage nurse of the 107th."

Now the smile's sharp. "I'm well aware of who I am dear. And I don't have to dye my hair green and run to some future self for help."

"She knew my plans. She came to **me**."

"With the idea of kidnapping Angie?"

"The other girl was her idea—"

"Then Angie was all yours?"

That's when Hydra lurches forward. Straining against her bonds and letting her words drop like old honey. "After the Soldier she's always been my favorite—"

Peggy punches her. Hard. And she enjoys it. Her mouth's open in an angry half grin and she's looming over Hydra who's laid out on her back from the blow.

"Peggy."

She whips around and seeing Steve immediately pulls herself together. Even tugs on her shirt where it's ridden up from the quick viciousness of the blow. "Right." She's still jittery and the next words out of her mouth sound forced. Almost like a bad actress in a play. "Captain would you care to confer with me. Outside?"

He glances down at Hydra. She's shaking her head and wincing, but otherwise seems unharmed. So he nods.

In the hall he reaches for Peggy and pulls her into a hug that's all stiff like they barely know each other. He ignores it. "You okay?"

"Twice now that woman's arranged to have Angie abducted." She frowns. "Experimented on. Because of me."

"Experimented?"

She shakes her head. "All to get to me."

"It worked in there."

"That's not helping."

"Look Peggy—whatever she's done you can't blame yourself."

She scoffs and shakes her head. She's acting like she's insulted more than she's angry. "No, I blame **that** green haired loon. I've got two children, and ex-husband and a best friend worth more than a Rockefeller and she's fixated on my girlfriend? And you heard the way she said it. She's probably the first one pinning little pink triangles on—"

He reaches out again and squeezes her shoulders. That's enough. She smiles shyly out of thanks and shakes her head. "If she was planning on taking Angie already than she should know where they took her."

"So we go back in?"

"Yes. No." She groans. "Let her stew a while. I need a good cup of tea and something to eat first. About the only thing I've eaten all day is—" She blushes a red nearly as bright as her lipstick. "Tea?"

"Sure."

####

They're having their tea and eating a box of cookies Peggy insists on calling biscuits when the front door opens and Tony clanks in in his armor, sans helmet. That is, presumably, still hidden away somewhere by Peggy.

Between her wide eyed startled look and her cheeks being puffed out from all the cookies she's stuffed in her mouth Peggy looks a lot like a chipmunk.

His fingers itch to draw again. But this scene would be in colored pencils. That way he could get the red and gold of Stark's armor just right and the way the light overhead catches in Peggy's hair.

"Angie and my mother have been kidnapped and the last you saw me I was half dead from electrocution and you two are eating…cookies?"

Peggy holds the box out and speaks without swallowing. Little specks of cookie fly. "Biscuit?"

He's ready for Stark to rankle but the other guy shakes his head and comes forward and takes the whole box from her delicately.

"Did you even wonder," he asks.

The bashful look Peggy shoots Steve is enough for him. Neither of them had actually **noticed** Tony was missing. Hadn't even thought about it.

"We caught Madame Hydra—Viper—a version of her," he says. It's a…decent excuse.

Peggy swallows her mouthful of cookie. "We've been interrogating her to find out where they took them."

Stark kicks the box of cookies back and catches a few in his mouth. Crunches on them noisily. "I've got that one covered."

"How" Steve asks.

"They took my mom, and she happens to have my watch."

Peggy's confused. "I'm sorry how does that help?"

"The watch and my suit communicate on a spectrum that hasn't even been discovered yet. Which means we're the only ones broadcasting. Which means—"

She looks at him with a kind of awe she wouldn't even gift Howard with. "You can find them."

Tony grins. "Yeah. I can find them."


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve

They get ushered off the boat and into the back of a truck. Angie doesn't see any of it on account of the hood stuck on her head and ruining her hair. But the fabric is thin enough she can make out little bits and pieces of the world around them. And she can make out the sun. Coming up and blasting her in the face.

Things get dark in the truck and it rattles along roads for ever and ever and ever. Maria twitches steadily after a while and Angie has to sit up, still unable to see, and declare that, "Unless you want a mess you better take a break and get us a to facility."

There's hurried discussions in impenetrable German and then the ride gets bumpy as they pull off the road. Stones ping noisily against the undercarriage and she can even hear the grass they're driving through.

She stands up and positions herself in front of the door. Hunches down like Harrison Dillard at the starting line.

That gets Maria stirring. "What are you doing?"

She nods at the door even though Maria probably can't see. The truck's slowing down. "Probably no more than two fellas up front. Maybe only one of them coming back here to let us out. I'll try and deal with him. You run."

It sounds like Maria's already shaking her head, "You can't know that."

No, but she can hope it. "I'm okay in a fight…I think. I can maybe take him."

Possibly. She doesn't like to think about what she did to the guy back at the villa.

"Only he's probably got a gun and a friend and your hands are tied up behind you." Maria rushes over on her knees. Angie can feel her get close, "You can't do it."

"I gotta try—"

She's standing and Maria's maybe kneeling. She thinks she can make her out in the gap at the bottom of her hood. It's warm in the back of the truck and with their heads all covered up and they're both breathing hard. It keeps blowing back against making it all more humid and unpleasant.

"Why?"

Angie's not real sure how to explain it to Maria.

How to tell her that once upon a time she got yanked out of her car and all she can remember is this fear as deep as in the marrow of her bones. How all she's got to show for it is memories as hard to grab as raw egg on a spoon and a kind of dread that runs over her like a bucket of ice water any time she finds herself doing things she never thought she could do.

Like play the guitar or throw a knife or beat a man half to death in her own damn hallway.

She swallows. Bounces on the balls of her feet as brakes squeal and the truck comes to a stop. "They got me once, and I don't plan on them getting me again." Not ever ever if she can help it. "I'll keep 'em busy and you make a run. Just stay low and don't stop and head for a real road."

"Is that what Peggy'd want?"

What kind of lousy question is— "It's what she'd do—"

"Only she's still alive so maybe not." She hears Maria rise up next to her. Even the truck's swaying's all stopped and her chest bumps into Angie's arm. "Now's the time to **survive**, Angie. That's it. We do what we've got to to live. Captain America bravery's got no place here."

"You don't know—" Angie shudders, "You don't know what they can do…"

"I survived three years with the likes of them." She can hear footsteps just outside. "So maybe I know better than you think."

Angie doesn't get to ask how. The back of the truck is open and Angie's dragged out by the arm and her hood's whipped off so fast she gets blinded by the sun.

It's now straight overhead.

Noon.

The soldier glowering at her has a gun and points to the big empty no civilization in sight field in front of them. "Go," he orders, and the way his finger strokes the trigger is enough to tell her what would happen if she ran.

Maybe even Steve Rogers would think twice with these kind of lousy odds. She glances warily at Maria, herself staring all bleary eyed heavenward.

"Now," the soldier intones.

Maria finally looks at Angie and nods towards the field and they make their way a little deeper in, hands behind their backs.

"I'm not a fan of Italy," Maria grunts. Not even a little attempt to get back to the conversation they'd been having.

"Well, the Nazi cultists really set it in a bad light."

Maria sneezes, "And I think I'm allergic to the grass."

They help each other do their business and Angie asks Maria if she's okay and Maria says she's really not, but her shivering's and when they go back to the truck she climbs in all on her own and sits against one side.

"They're taking us to the sea," she says softly when they're back on the road, and Angie has to squint at her to make her out through the hood.

"How can you tell. They show you a map?"

"How the sun was casting shadows. And that grass. The breeze. We're headed south. Towards water."

"So…you're the map." She says it kind of like a joke.

Maria shrugs and Angie thinks she can hear a smile in the dark. "I've got a good since of direction." Her head thumps against the side of the truck. "Why you think they're they taking us to water? Why not fly us out? Or keep driving? Aren't HYDRA's bases all up in mountains?"

Angie's got no clue, but there's little flashes of memory at the edge of her brain and that noisy rescue off a boat she once had to go through. So she shudders.

And hopes she's thinking all wrong.

####

She really, really hopes she's wrong.

But she gets the feeling she isn't. Not when the truck is rolled onto another boat and they go for what seems like days but is only just hours. Then Angie and Maria are dragged out of the truck by gun point. Their hoods get whipped off long enough for them to catch a glimpse of the sun setting over so much water before they're shoved into a big canister that reminds her of a U-boat.

It's just the two of them inside and their breath rattles around like their heads are in a tub. They stare at one another in confusion before the canister lurches off the deck and is dropped into the water. It floats half a tick—long enough for them to both get their bearings—and then some engine at the back of it kicks into gear and they find themselves motoring towards the bottom of the ocean.

Angie shivers and Maria shuffles over to the big bulbous glass window at one end. "It's a submarine," she says in awe. "Only tiny! I've never—this is incredible!"

Angie wants to grouse about how nice it is that **now** Maria's snapping back to herself, but that might mean reminding the other woman of who's got them all held captive and the last thing either of them needs is a dose of something so sobering.

So she gets all inquisitive instead. "How're we moving?"

Maria shakes her head, "Engine—diesel by the smell of it." She pokes and prods at the instruments under the window as best she can with her hands still cuffed behind her. The instruments are all moving around like there's a third, invisible, person in the sub with them. "Controlled remotely. I wonder if—" Using her elbow she reaches for something that looks like the shift on a car and yelp when it sparks. "And they've electrified it. Clever—and irritating."

"Can we stop 'em from controlling this boat?"

Maria nods, "Sure, but there's no guarantee that will stop that," she motions at the stick she'd tried touching, "And I'm not seeing any vents for air which means our supply is probably real limited."

"So you're saying we're being motored somewhere underwater and there's no escape?"

The tendons in Maria's neck all bulge and she stares at those controls grimly, "Yeah. Looks that way. Think your gal pal'll be able to find us this far down?"

Angie shrugs, "Two things I believe in: HYDRA being a bunch of SOB's better off dead, and Peggy Carter."

"I don't think I could ever trust someone that much."

Angie thinks to tell her she felt the same until Peggy mounted a rescue on the back of a giant turtle, but she keeps her trap shut.

####

Peggy's running late.

That's what Angie tells herself when she and Maria are dragged out of the little submarine and hustled along to a cold room with two cots and two chairs bolted to the floor and a mess of disposable looking pants and shirts in a pile on a table that's bolted down too. Because why not.

They finally get their wrists out of the cuffs and Angie rubs at the sore bits and nods at the toilet and sink number in the corner. "Cozy."

Maria shrugs and sorts through the clothes. "Nicer than the last place I had to stay. Roof, no rats, only two to a toilet. And it's got a helluva view."

She's meaning the little porthole looking out to a whole lot of dark blue water.

Because they're still **under** water. Like something out of a Tom Swift book.

"Hope your girlfriend can swim."

"If she can't she's got friends who can."

Maria is nonplussed. "Fancy."

"Floated me around on a giant turtle once. Hand to God. Fella wearing nothing but little green shorts."

"Fit?"

"If I weren't head over exclusively for women I would have been fanning myself."

"I'll be sure to put on my best little prison number."

Angie hopes Namor helps too. But mainly because she's already ready to be rescued. Getting carted through all of Italy and half the Mediterranean has seriously cut into the time she should have been spending on her show.

Which she is definitely gonna get fired from for being a no show at.

She hopes Peggy called them up with a good excuse. Maybe involving a car accident. Or a really phlegmy case of the flu.

####

In the truck Maria told her it was about survival. Little she's gleamed she figures Maria ought to know.

As she tells it staying alive is a lot more important than being brave or proud or noble and dead. Steve Rogers would disagree, but Steve Rogers—at least the present one—is, as Angie understands it, a few hundred feet below ice because he was all of the above. And she's got to admit that it didn't seem to do him a lot of good. He was brave and proud and noble and she's the one that spends most nights curled up in Peggy's arms.

So she resolves to not be brave or proud or noble when the guards come and "escort" her, all alone, to a room that's familiar in that unnerving way and has her tasting cold metal and maybe blood in her mouth just by looking at it.

The green-haired lady is there too and she smiles so damn smugly Angie has the urge to be a **little** brave and punch her in the mouth.

"Like the decor," she asks, "nearly identical to how things were the last time you were with us. I wanted it to be," she presses her hands together like she's praying, "familiar."

Angie crosses her arms, "Familiar would have been making it look like my ma's living room. This just looks and smells like a bad hospital."

"Anyone ever tell you you aren't very cute, smart or funny?"

"Never," Angie says evenly. "So what's the plan. Gonna pull my teeth? Break a few bones in the name of science?" Okay she's being a little brave.

Steve Rogers can't be the only kid from South Brooklyn to mouth off to HYDRA.

"It's a thought," the lady says, and Angie's dread must show on her face because the woman full on smiles. "But really I just needed you for a help on updating a project."

"Should have called my agent."

"I'm afraid that wouldn't work. See I have a friend working remotely and within a very tight window. So you need to sit in this chair and stare at the screen and play nice."

"Or what?"

"Or the other girl dies."

It's about survival Angie Martinelli. Not being proud or being brave or doing what Peggy'd do. It's about staying alive and making sure sweet, innocent, been through too much Maria Carbonell survives too.

So she sits in the chair and stares at the screen and holds onto the armrests for all she's worth.

And a balding man in a prison uniform stares back at her—his face all big and bulgy and distorted from the strong curve of the screen's glass In a very thick Russian accent introduces himself as Dr. Fennhoff.

She can see him rubbing his ring as he smiles at her serenely.

"Hello Angie," he says, that smirk's too soothing to be safe. "I know you're very scared and nervous, so I need you to do something for me. I need you to focus."


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

"If I have to watch Tony diddle about for one more minute I might murder him."

Steve snorts into his tea. Tony vaguely protests with a "hey" but doesn't look up from his work.

Peggy levels a stare at Steve. The same kind she'd use during the war when it was like she could read his mind. "So?"

"So what?"

"Coming along, or do you prefer to stay here with the diddler?"

Steve does **not** prefer to sit around while Stark talks to himself and builds his scifi tracker.

But he's also not crazy about going with Peggy. Because while her girlfriend was being kidnapped they were walking on a beach and holding each other and—

Jesus.

The two of them cheated on a woman that hasn't done a thing to Steve besides be there for Peggy—besides be the one Peggy got to go home after the war with.

Steve's got a lot of feelings at the moment and he worries that if he gets in a car all alone with Peggy he's gonna tell her about them and he won't be able to shut up.

"You can't stay here," she insists, "And people are always much nicer to me when I have a wall of muscle standing just behind me."

"Smooth," Tony mutters under his breath.

Peggy shoots him a dirty look.

Then she looks back at Steve and she sounds incredibly genuine, "I could really use the help."

So Steve says yes.

He questions it almost as soon as they get in the car. The doors close and Peggy hasn't put the key in the ignition yet and it's…intimate.

He's positive she can hear his heart hammering in his chest.

"Peggy I—"

She twists the key and the roar of the engine drowns out anything he is going to say.

On the road Peggy's hands fidget on the wheel. "I don't drive very often." The admission is very conversational.

"You have a driver?"

"Usually—yes. Let's me do work…on the way to work."

Steve chuckles to himself because Peggy sounds like Steve. Sam would probably hum some old R&amp;B number about harmony.

"Angie does a lot of the driving too. She's wizard behind the wheel—used to work as a getaway driver back in the 30s."

"Don't remember that in her IMDB page." It's a joke that leaves Peggy confused. Steve tries not to think about what he **did** read on Angela Carter's IMDB page. There's a reason she hasn't had a movie out since 1991.

"Sorry," he finally says.

Peggy glances over and the back at the road. "Whatever for?"

There's just so damn much to be sorry for. He runs his hands over his pants. Smoothing them over his thighs. The scrape of his skin against fabric is surprisingly noisy.

"I was on that beach too." Peggy's eyes never leave the road. "I'm just—" her hands twist on the steering wheel. "I'm **more** to blame."

"It's a competition?" He says it with a half-smile.

She smiles and some of her hair slips out of the neat style she's pinned it into. Falls in her eyes. Makes Steve feel giddy the way only she can.

But he can see the way the smile isn't quite real. It's not there in the eyes where it should be. "The last ten years I've gotten very good at loving you." She says it so softly Steve wonders if he's imagining it. "Loving the memory of you." She looks over again and tears are making normally dark eyes bright. "I never thought I'd get to love the **real** you again." Her eyes are back on the road and she's as morose looking as the feeling that's starting to well up in Steve's chest. "So I learned to love someone else."

Steve leans back in his seat and stares at the countryside racing by. It's hard to breathe. The air goes in and out of his lungs like he's got asthma again.

Because he's always just—just missed the mark. Again and again and again with Peggy it's been too late.

"What if I went further back," he says. "Stopped myself from taking a nose dive into the Atlantic?"

"You regret saving the world?" Peggy sounds surprised.

"The whole point of a sacrifice—especially one like that one—is that you're not there afterwards. It's like jumping on a grenade to save the platoon and surviving."

"It's hard living when you think you're supposed to be dead. But you make it work."

"You did?"

She looks back over and gives him a muted smile. "I had help."

He thinks of Nat and her hands on his shoulder as she leans in to tell him to smile and Sam and his soundtrack for every occasion. And the mint gum he pops when he's grinning at Steve like they're in on a secret no one else knows.

####

Having a wall of muscle behind her **does** seem to help Peggy. The owner of the laundry service looks from Peggy's terrifyingly easy smile to Steve's best no-nonsense glare and then listens to Peggy's passable Italian and tells them everything.

The everything being that he didn't know his truck was gone until that morning and that the usual driver was a no show to work. He gives them an address further up the coast and Peggy beams and that puts the owner at ease.

Dealing with the driver is less easy. He lives in an old village that's not quite as friendly to tall, blond folks like Steve. Peggy mutters something about it not being friendly to Italian dictators either and when he gives her a puzzled look she grins goofily at her own joke.

"Do you think he'll make it difficult," she asks. He watches her check the clip on her gun before slipping it into her purse.

"If he's still alive and loyal to HYDRA?"

She harrumphs. "I hope he doesn't have a cyanide pill. Having to—"

"Stick your hand in there to stop 'em? I know. Still got teeth marks from my first run in." He holds up his hand to show off the curved row of silver marks.

"I remember that. **And** Dum Dum telling you to use your shield next time."

"My shield would break their teeth."

"Better their teeth than your hand." She says it with a lot of cheeky flourish as she hops out of the car.

It's enough to make Steve grin.

####

The gunfire less than ten minutes later wipes the grin right off his face. He runs for the house Peggy had gone too. Is half way there when he comes face to face with the driver—red-faced and panicked.

Then the man is grunting and stumbling forward. Blindly reaching out to keep himself up right. Steve snatches him by the collar and puts him in a headlock that the guy isn't nearly strong enough or wiry enough to get out of. Peggy's a good five yards behind them both and also red-faced. And her gun is on the ground at Steve's feet.

He looks from it and back to her, "Nice toss Lefty."

She waves him off and pants, "Gut punched me like a bleeding boxer." She squats and sucks in another breath. "Knocked all the wind—out—of me."

"You okay?"

She just nods. Keeps panting.

Steve shakes the guy, "What about you?"

The guy grumbles and struggles. "Careful," Steve says, "Or next time she'll throw a shoe. Or a brick."

"My aim's impeccable."

The guy already has a knot forming on the back of his head.

Steve hauls him up and presses him against the plaster of the closest wall. He and Peggy are both mindful of the people hanging out of windows and peeking out of doors. They've got an audience and need to work quickly.

At the other other end of the street two young men have come out of a cafe and are moving forward warily.

Town like this doesn't like outsiders.

Fortunately for them the guy folds like the Lion of Verdun and tells them all about how he's been recruited to a glorious cause. Slowly doors close and people step away from their windows and the two men turn on the heel and go back to their coffees and cigarettes as it becomes clear that fascism survived the fall of most of its leaders.

"You're not very bright," Peggy says suddenly, her eyes flickering to the retreating men, "or loyal."

"They're rebuilding the world **you** broke," he spits.

Peggy's gun comes up to the man's forehead faster than Steve can stop it.

Her finger hovers over the trigger.

All Steve can do is say Peggy's own name carefully in warning.

He's always been lucky enough to rarely see this side of Peggy. The hard and cold soldier. That woman that saved Erskine and nearly put a bullet in Heinz Kruger.

She's almost as terrifying as the woman who could put on a red dress and flirt with him like he was the only guy in the room.

Peggy snatches the gun away and says haughtily, "He should ride back with us. He can ponder his love of fascism in a cell."

That raises Steve's eyebrow. "You guys have a prison?"

"Built for fools just like him and Hydra."

They frog walk him to the car and not a single soul shows up to help him.

This idiot may want fascism to live, but his town put it to rest with Mussolini.

####

The SHIELD agents waiting at the villa to take the fascist and Madame HYDRA away are just as unimpressed with the idiot's rantings as his own village was.

"Ma'am," one asks.

Peggy's very dismissive. "By all means, gag him. But see to it he speaks with someone when he arrives."

The other agent looks at Steve curiously but flushes when Peggy clears her throat and barks out more quick orders.

"You run a tight ship," Steve says as they both head back inside.

"I just like to be in charge—at least that's what Angie and Daniel claim."

"Daniel?"

"Ex-husband."

Steve stumbles.

Peggy catches it and smirks, "You don't care very much about my love life in the future do you?"

He swallows. Then Peggy seems to realize she's leaning against the door and flirting with Steve and turns almost as red as her lipstick.

They're saved from more uncomfortable, awkward, wonderful discussion by Stark's too late announcement that he knows where Angie and his mother were taken.

"Mediterranean by way of Genoa," he announces with the kind of pride of a kid showing off a project to their parents.

"We know," Steve says. "Spy Peggy just captured told us everything."

Stark shakes it off. "So what are we waiting for? I'll suit up and strap you two in we can be there in forty."

"We've already been through this. You flying around 1955 Italy in a man-sized jet suit isn't happening."

"Extenuating circumstances Cap. My future as a member of the human race is kind of on the line."

Peggy huffs, "And it won't do you any good to go in guns blazing." She looks to Steve for support, "is everyone in the twenty-first century this much of a bull dozer?"

"Says the **human** bull dozer." Steve gets the feeling Tony's on thin ice—like all his infantile exuberance has been, maybe, an act. Like any second the act will crumble and someone very unpleasant will be left with them. "I read the files Pegs. I know all about what you do in East Germany in '76."

Steve may sense the impending implosion, but Peggy, the aptly named bulldozer, goes full speed ahead. "Whatever I do in the future has no bearings on the present. And in the present I think more than a few people might give pause if they see a red and gold man jetting his ass off to **Genoa**."

"I'd think you of all people would want to get there fast. It's my mom they've got. But Angie's you're—"

She raises her finger like she's about to admonish a child. "Don't—"

"Oh wait. This just makes it all easy for you doesn't it? Angie's out of the so you can go right on f—"

Peggy Carter's right hook will always be one of the most impressive things Steve's ever seen. It's a punch he tries to emulate in his own style. There's a particular way she twists her body. How she uses torque to unleash a punch like a sledge hammer. It's the kind of control folks like Batroc and Taskmaster would be envious of. Her two knuckles connect with Stark's jaw. Which, when Peggy's the one unleashing the punch, is enough to knock a man out in one blow. It spins him so fast Stark's brain jostles around inside his skull and sends him right out of the waking world. He sinks to the floor.

All Steve can say on the matter, after it's done and Peggy's looming over the unconscious form of her future godson, is "You're going to give him brain damage if you keep doing that."

####

Tony wakes up with a whimper a few minutes later. By that point Steve's loaded him and his suit into one car and is trailing after Peggy—who has decided she needs to be alone in another car.

"I'm not sure how," Tony moans, "but I think this is child abuse."

"She sent this along for your jaw." Steve tosses him an ice pack Peggy helpfully made before they left. "And it can't be child abuse if you haven't been born."

Stark presses the pack to his face. "Temporal pre-natal abuse."

"That's not even a string of real words."

"It could be—" He's pried a chunk out of the pack and sucks on it. The noise is obnoxiously loud. "In fact when we get back to 2015 I'm going to make it part of the corporate mission."

"Pepper'll love that."

He leans into the front seat and peers out the window. Steve can hear the air being pulled around the rapidly melting cube. "Did she really take a separate car?"

Now **Steve** wants to punch him. He settles for sounding like a mother hen—if Bucky has his memories he'd be proud. "Was it really necessary to go out of your way to hurt her like that?"

Tony doesn't say anything for a little bit. Steve can feel him staring at him. Studying him like he's a rocket design down in a lab. He crunches the ice and then immediately regrets it—judging by the face he makes.

"Do you know what happened yesterday while you two went down to the beach to relive VE Day?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty aware."

"Angie, my sweet dear godmother, who cried more than I did watching Big Bird Goes to China and sat shiva with me when my parents died—that Angie, went up to her bedroom that she shares with **that** woman and worried about losing the life she has every right to. Then she was beaten, drugged, and abducted—along with my mother, the Holocaust survivor."

"I'm sorry—"

Stark sounds irritated. The same way he is when he's explaining some complex science no one else can really get. "I'm not blaming you Rogers. You're so stuck in 1945 it's depressing to breathe the same air. I'm blaming **her**. Because she knows better."

"How the heck is she supposed to know better?"

Tony's laugh is irritatingly derisive. "You don't get it."

He twists in the driver's seat to look at Stark. "What exactly am I supposed to get?"

"Angie loves Peggy and Peggy loves Angie." He's dropped his ice pack so he can lace his fingers together. "That's a constant in the universe, Rogers. Like imaginary numbers and the speed of light. Peggy doesn't get to ignore it just because her ex resurrected himself for a long weekend."

Only Steve didn't resurrect himself. **Tony** brought them here. Put them in Peggy's path. Constructed their meeting like one of his suits.

So Steve thinks that maybe he' protesting too much. That maybe a lot more is at play than a guy upset because a couple from his childhood are on shaky ground.

He thinks back to the last time he saw Peggy. In 2015. When the nurses told him they couldn't reveal confidential information and then he hopped onto a quinjet and found a very cranky Tony Stark sitting in the corner staring at nothing.

"Stark?"

Tony glances at him and then back towards the road. His eyes are focused on her car.

"The nurses said family had her power of attorney back in 2015. Would never tell me who." Stark's jaw is set. "It's you isn't it."

The noise of the road fills the car. Like the white noise machine Sam got him to help him sleep.

"She signed her life over to me in '07. Said Sharon was too young and didn't need the hassle of an aunt with Alzheimer's. Figured I could put my assistant on it."

"I visit her—"

"I know. The nurses call and give me an update once a week. You and Sharon are her biggest fans. Romanov too. Which didn't make sense until this adventure."

"If you've got her power of attorney than the doctors told you. Didn't they?" Gave him the news no one would give Steve.

He's looking at him coolly again and the ice is nearly dissolved. "Told me what?"

Steve has a hard time saying it, because saying it makes it real in a way that thinking it never could. "That she's…that Peggy's dying."

His laughter is more a snort. A gratingly condescending kind.

He leans back against his suit of armor and raps it lightly on the thigh. "We're all going sometimes Cap. All the doctors did was give me her date."

####

When they get to Genoa they know they've found the right boat because Peggy finds Nat skulking around it and plotting to invade. She's wearing the most wholesome school girl uniform Steve's ever seen and he and Tony share a look of mutual horror at the sight.

Peggy's barely begun to explain what has happened when Nat scowls and walks away.

"Blood hell," Peggy mumbles.

"What's up?"

"The infant's about to go and invade—"

BAM

"—HYDRA."

Nat dangles off the side of the boat and waves them forward. "Hey geezers! Cruise ship's leaving without you," she yells.

Peggy hustles forward and shouts back in a harsh whisper—something about not starting another war and would she please leave some of the crew alive.

Tony rubs at his nose, which is never gonna heal with the way he keeps getting punched in it. "You'd think teenage Natasha Romanov would be **less** terrifying, but then—"

BAM

"Nope. Much more terrifying."

"I was planning on teasing her about being so old when we got back. On account of all the fossil jokes?"

BAM

"But I'm juuuust not feeling it."

Tony, never taking his eyes off the boat, extends a hand. "Pact to never mention her age to ever again in '55 or 2015."

Steve, also keeping his eyes on the vessel, takes Tony's hand and gives it a firm shake. "Agreed."

Nat hangs off the side again. "Seriously. Boat is leaving port!"

Peggy's nowhere to be seen, but Nat's announcement is punctuated by the blare of the boat's horn—which hints at just where she's gone.

'Peggy loves Angie,' Stark had said. A constant up there with gravity and Planck's. As the boat leaves the dock and Nat lords over their captured HYDRA crew with a machine gun while Peggy and Stark fiddle with the personal submarine they've found in the boat's hold, Steve's inclined to agree.

That kind of love **is** a constant.

And he's just a fossil from 1945.


	14. Chapter 14

She comes to with a pounding headache. Like the one she gets when the streets are all yellow with pollen or she's just been drinking gin instead of water. It's right between her eyes.

Her mouth is all dry too and tasting like old blood.

She rolls up into a sitting position on the awful cot she's been left on. She's back in the room she'd been first stuck in with Maria. It hasn't changed at all. The other cot isn't even made up. Blanket's still neatly folded on top.

That's because Maria's squatting over by the toilet and looking at where it goes into the wall. She seems to pick up on having an audience because she glances over her shoulder and sags with relief seeing Angie.

"Was worried about you when they brought you back unconscious."

"What happened to me?"

"No idea, but you've got a helluva shiner."

Angie reaches up to touch one side of her face and winces when her fingertips graze a bit of her that's all bruised and swollen.

Then she notices her knuckles. They're all banged up like Peggy's are after "just a little work trip."

She balls one hand into a fist and hisses at the bright pain. "I don't remember a fight…"

"Here's hoping you gave as good as you got."

Judging by her knuckles she thinks that's a given.

Maria starts tugging on the toilet and nods at her to come over. "Gimme a hand will ya."

"You doin' some plumbing?"

Maria shoots her an annoyed look that Angie knows for a fact she saw Tony Stark shoot the other day. "I need to get to the flushing mechanism. Lot of good stuff there. Rod and springs and junk. Might be able to rig something to—"

"Break us out of our cell that's currently a thousand feet underwater?"

"Step by step Ms. Carter—" She stops tugging to lean on the toilet sink business. "Can I call you Angie? You held my hands while I whizzed in a field so I figure—"

"Angie's fine."

"So, **Angie**," she's flushing with amusement at her own lame joke, "we go step by step. Step one: get tools. Step two: use tools to get out of cell—"

"Step three?"

"You're the one flipped a HYDRA boy like a dance partner. Can't you just—" She mimics a few bad punches with her bony fists.

"I don't think that's how it works."

"It? What the heck does that mean?"

Angie shrugs.

Maria raises an eyebrow. "Aren't you some kind of super spy?"

"What makes you think—"

"The punches. Flying in jets on the regular. The super spy friends. Super spy girlfriend—sort of. And you being a big famous actress with a garage full of cars that'd make Howard Stark salivate."

"Stark doesn't touch my cars—and I'm not a spy. Until this whole abduction thing the only person I've ever punched I was related to or sleeping with."

"Ew—and didn't really look that way to me."

"It's the truth."

"So knocking guys' lights out is just a natural talent?"

Course it isn't.

"I didn't even know I could do it until the other night."

"Late bloomer."

Angie goes over to the door and listens. There's nothing but the sounds of what she presumes all weird underwater bases sound like. Pipes and canned air and an intermittent eerie silence that gives her the willies.

"You know I got taken before?" She says it real quiet.

Maria keeps on looking at her. Not even a hint of pity or concern. Makes it really easy to confess to her. "Sure," she says.

"They did something to me. Noticed it when I did this dancing movie. Could learn the steps quick as you please, but kept forgetting my lines."

Now Maria's frowning.

"I'm good at lines," Angie explains. "Used to I could remember a whole book of a musical years later. But now…I pick this stuff up and other stuff just—" She makes a whooshing noise.

"Wonder what you forgot to lay a punch like that."

Angie doesn't like to think about it. Ever. She shakes her head, "Hopefully nothing good."

####

It's a group of people that aren't going to show fear. Those nerves that build up in most people he's gone into combat with aren't there. Tony is examining the sub they're using and Nat is staring at the hatch with her hand on her gun and Peggy is—Peggy is looking at him in that officious way of hers.

"You know what this reminds me of?" Steve has got to break the silence taking up the little space they're in.

Peggy raises one eyebrow, "The first time you jumped out of a plane?"

He ducks his head.

"Hopefully there will be a significantly smaller HYDRA presence," she jokes.

"And with you here it's bound to be more efficient."

"Efficient?" She's raising her eyebrow again.

"It was a—"

"Bad joke," Natasha pipes in. She's giving him a pitying look. "You don't talk to women much do you?"

"No," Peggy says with a smile, "He doesn't."

Steve thinks about dance partners and missed dances and how very soon he'll go back to a world where Peggy often forgets he's alive.

She must see it on his face because her own smile falters and then she clears her throat and nods at the hatch. "So what's the plan here? Metal man goes in with palms blazing?"

"They're repulsers," Tony interjects, "and seeing as we'll be in a pressurized tube underwater I want to keep the projectiles to a minimum. Rescue's pretty worthless if you all drown."

Nat asks, "You're not drowning?"

His metal clad finger taps his metal-clad chest. "Water tight and carrying an oxygen supply in the case of underwater adventures or jaunts through wormholes."

"Worm—what?"

He does one of his dismissive hand waves and comes over to a second hatch. "I got a couple of ideas for dealing with the welcoming party, but I am gonna have to ask—how long can you all hold your breath?"

####

The last time Angie worked as smoothly with another person she was driving getaway. Between her and Maria they get the toilet pulled away from the wall—bulkhead Maria reminds her—in record time. Maria quickly dismantles all kind of stuff in the back and rigs up something like out of Frankenstein—including a whole lot of wires streaming out from the hole in the wall—bulkhead.

She's wrapping fabric she tore off the bottom of her pants around her hands when Angie gets up to nerve to ask, "What the heck is it?"

"Electromagnet. Hopefully I can use it to open the door from this side."

Their side of the door is all smooth—almost seamlessly integrated into the bulkhead.

She watches Maria pick up her fancy device and heft it a little.

"Magnet—like in microphones?"

Maria grins and shuffles over to the door. "Little bigger."

She manipulates the wires and the light over head dims as the thing in her hand hums. "You pray much Angie?"

"Only when I'm in church."

"How about you pretend this place is a cathedral then, and pray part of this door is ferromagnetic."

####

Steve catches Peggy's eye over the rising waterline. The submarine is dark with the exception of the glow of Tony's armor and it casts sporadic flares of light over them as he makes the hole in the sub bigger and bigger.

"I'll come in from the outside," he says, and his voice has the tinny quality it gets as it filters through the speaker in the helmet. "You three try not to die."

Nat is trying to be serene but the tips of her fingers are white from where they're bracing against the bulkhead. Peggy seems more calm. Eyes on the hatch and her entire body coiled up like a snake at the zoo.

"You ready," he asks.

There's a tiny frown there in the way her lips quirk.

The water is up to all their chins now and rises faster as Stark slips out of the hole he's made.

"Last one to the rescue loves them least," Nat calls just as the water goes over their heads and everything goes dark.

Then there's the eery silence. Not like being at a community pool. There the noise of dozens of other kids carries through the water. This is like the pool they had him sitting in for what felt like hours. They'd watch him sitting down there at the bottom and write little notes in their clipboards and he's stare up at them and never tell them how well he could see through 15 feet of chlorinated pool water.

There's ticks and rattles now as HYDRA soldiers on the other side prepare to open the door. They think they'll be facing off against a very dry invasion and even through the metal he can hear their urgent orders in German.

Can hear the rifles settling on soldiers' shoulders.

They've long since opened their side of the hatch, so when the other side gives way it brings a flood with it. The soldiers are too busy trying to stay upright in the deluge to shoot at the three of them pouring in.

Nat slides farthest on the wave and quickly twirls up like the dancer she claims she used to be. She's all grace now, pretty and efficient. But this young version of her lacks that little edge that thrums with bizarre joy at a fight.

That, Steve realizes, Nat gets from Peggy.

Peggy doesn't just inhabit a room. She uses it like a wrecking ball. The soldiers' guns, the bulkheads, and the men themselves are all part of her arsenal.

She doesn't smile while she fights. But she doesn't seem to care how she looks either. While Nat's face is carefully schooled to reveal nothing Peggy punches and kicks with snarls.

This fight? It's probably the first time Peggy's really let go since Angie was taken.

It'd be terrifying and awe inspiring if Steve wasn't busy using his shield and fists to beat through the crowd of soldiers the other two left him.

The woman and girl both wordlessly dart down separate corridors and he hears more gun shots and then screams.

Never mind. He's got a little time to be terrified.

####

They're creeping down the corridor like kids' snuck out of class and even though Maria's taller and lankier she's leaning down and clutching onto Angie like Angie's the World War Two hero with the big honkin' shield.

They haven't been caught so far, but they also haven't seen anyone. All the doors are closed and the lights are flickering and sometimes they hear a real distant scream.

It's down right spooky.

Then. Then they keep going and the screams get louder and sometimes there's gunfire.

"That can't be good," Maria says in a harsh whisper.

"Could be if it's the calvary making a helluva racket."

A gun goes off again. This time so close the noise rings in their ears. Then there's screaming. A guy moaning in pain.

The gun goes off again.

Angie glances at Maria who's pale like the paint on the bulkheads. Only one way of figuring out if the shooting is because of help.

She takes a breath and rounds the corner.

It takes her breath away.

A soaked through Peggy, wet hair pulled back, make up all washed away.

Takes Angie's breath clear away.

Then she's flinching at bullets. They whiz right by Angie's ear. Hotter then Hell itself. She ducks and spins, which, if she's gonna be honest, is not her first choice for a reaction. **Her** first choice is to do what Maria does which is dive through the door and **away** from the gunman.

Angie, for a reason she cannot fathom, runs towards the gunman.

Okay, technically gun**wo**man.

It's the green-haired bitch who got Angie stuck a few hundred feet below water in the first place and she owes her a good talking to involving her fist, her foot, and maybe a little forehead action right to the nose.

Angie makes to tussle but green-haired bitch has got plans of her own and she yanks the door between Angie and Peggy shut just as Peggy's reached it.

Then she grins at Angie through a curtain of hair as green as seaweed and yanks a lever that sets to flooding both sides immediately.

"No Iron Man if his mother's drowned before he's bo—"

Angie lands the punch on the lady's jaw just like Peggy would. Kind that turns a person into a sack of potatoes. She drops her in the water that's already licking at her toes and tries to get the door open.

But it isn't budging.

Peggy and Maria are scrambling on the other side, but even with the porthole letting her see 'em she's having a heckuva time understanding them.

Whatever's being said is urgent and sharp and leaves Peggy looking 'bout gutted.

Which tells Angie all she needs to know.

Door ain't opening any time soon.

They look at each other and they can't say much. Nothing that'll be heard anyways.

All they can do is try to communicate with the eyes. And the face. Like one of those exercises her acting coach would make her do.

Other girls would get the giggles, but Angie could commit.

"I'll be okay," she mouths.

And Peggy shakes her head. Flecks of water scatter. She comes closer. Her jaw is all set like she's about to get angry and do something stupid.

"Go," Angie insists.

Peggy's not budging.

Angie's eyes flicker to Maria. Who's shivering behind Peggy and looking 'bout like a drowned rat.

Peggy follows her gaze and then turns back around.

'She does't matter,' is what Peggy's saying.

'But she's gotta, English.'

'Not as much as you.'

It's such a damn nice sentiment Peggy relays with her eyes that Angie's got to put her hand up to the glass of the porthole. Peggy does the same.

It's romantic hooey they don't have time for.

When they pull their hands away Peggy's eyes are rimmed with red and the back of Angie's throat is burning and Angie's gotta turn and grab the green-haired bitch by the collar and drag her along in water that's now up to her knees.

####

The deluge tapers off the further from that door they get. It gets so dry Angie's gotta drag the lady over dry floors. She's a lot heavier when she's not floating and Angie's plum warn out in no time at all.

She hears more fellas coming after what seems like eons of nothing and braces herself to fight even though the conscious part of her is saying run like hell. It's like when she learns a dance routine so well it becomes reflex. Only she doesn't remember anyone teaching her these steps.

She lashes out with a foot to the first one's shin and is letting loose with a fist directed towards the second one's jaw when the first one grabs her and pulls her back.

Then her brain is going pretty clear and she realizes it's Steve Rogers holding her to his big manly chest and little Natalie staring at her in shock.

####

Bugger it to hell.

She can't be sure **who** deserves the buggering. Maybe fate. Maybe Madame Hydra the elder. Or the younger.

Never mind. Both Madame Hydras deserve a good buggering straight to hell.

"What's wrong," Maria Carbonell asks. The poor girl is breathless from all the running and clearly not used to or equipped for the amount of action she's been dealing with.

Peggy sighs and nods towards the brightly lit map she's just found in the maintenance room for this ghastly outpost.

The girl comes closer and peers at it. Then, "Shit."

Peggy closes her eyes. Yes "shit" is apt. Also "fuck" and "god damn it."

Maria points one long finger at a spot on the map. "That's where they have the escape submarines."

"It would appear that way."

"And this is where we are?"

"Yes."

"So—"

"So, Ms. Carbonell, our only access was sealed off." she sucks in a big breath. That's what one always does when delivering ghastly news. Gives the recipient and deliverer both time to prepare. "We're trapped."

The poor girl's shoulders sag.

Bugger just **everything**.


	15. Chapter 15

Peggy is **not** going to panic. Panicking won't help her and it won't help Howard's future wife. Panicking will only help HYDRA and she is damned if she's going to help HYDRA.

But the fact of the matter is…they're trapped.

Things are all turned around now. Angie is safe. Finally, Angie is safe. But Peggy and the future Mrs. Stark are stuck behind a few inches of steel that aren't going to open merely because she wishes it.

It's not an ideal situation.

Maria uses that savvy engineer brain to sort out a possible escape route, which is how the two women find themselves wading through hip-height water that's far too cold for comfort.

She still can't quite wrap her head around the stupidity of the design of this place, and she says as much out loud.

Which leads to Maria hurriedly explaining how it was likely related to the emergency cooldown of the enormous engines they'd found they were trapped with.

"I hate to say it, but they designed this place pretty well," Maria says in a very matter of fact sort of way that immediately makes it clear why Howard will fall for her one day.

She recants her claim as soon as they make it to the planned escape route. It's a "moon pool." Maria goes on about something related to pressure and easy access and she assures Peggy it will get them out safe and sound.

Until they actually see the place.

Specifically they see the single oxygen tank and breather.

Just one.

One tank and one very long swim.

She sags against the door frame and watches Maria rush around the room searching for another tank. She's muttering to herself in that way that all the geniuses do and she's flinging bits of scrap around as she hunts.

Peggy looks around for a map of the facility as she feels there ought to be at least one. She finds it on the far wall. Stares. Sighs.

Then she wades over to the oxygen tank and checks the levels.

Of course.

Nearly empty.

That's Peggy's luck.

Been her luck ever since she barreled into Steve at the hotel and stole his shield. One event after another has left Peggy feeling awful and miserable and now she's facing death because there's only one oxygen tank and two of them and Maria's got to live.

The life of a future hero depends on it.

She breathes slow and deep. Now isn't the time to wallow or panic. She's survived Nazis, super soldiers and one very enamored Atlantean and she is not going to be done in by a vessel that's sprung a leak.

"Can you swim," she asks the girl, and she has to shout over the din of rising water.

The girl can and Peggy forces the oxygen tank onto her. Strapping it to her back and slipping the mask over her face.

"You'll have to swim for the other side. Do you understand?"

The girl does, and she nods. "What about you," she asks and her voice is muffled by the mask.

"I'll find my way after you—"

"It's too far without oxygen."

Peggy knows that. The girl knows it too. She's just young and kind and concerned.

"I'm going to go look for another tank." She didn't spy a single one as they made their way to the moon pool. "I'll find one." She very likely won't. "**You** need to make your way to the other side. Tell them where I am."

The girl's wide eyes rove over Peggy—"But you've got to be a better swimmer than me right?" She tugs at the mask. "You take it. You can get to the other side and get help!"

The water laps at their waists. It's cold—leaching all the heat out of them and rising so terribly fast. She tightens the mask against the girl's face and takes her long hand in her own. Their skin is clammy and starting to prune.

"This isn't up for discussion. You swim for help and breathe shallow. **I'll** make my own way—"

"Angie'll kill me."

Angie will kill Peggy too. Level that one particular glare of hers at her. When she sees her again—if—she pushes the girl towards the water.

"Remember. Breathe shallow. You've got to make that air last."

The girl wades out into the pool. Turns and, while treading water, stares at Peggy with bright eyes. Then she dips down below the surface and disappears.

####

They three of them—with the HYDRA lady slung over Steve's shoulder—make their way to a "moon pool." Angie's got no idea what the heck a moon pool is supposed to be, and she's too cold and tired and aching to care.

The whole last day—or two—or three are all just this damn—damn **sand** in her head and it's like she's trying to grab big handfuls and watching it all sluice right out between her fingers. She's been fighting and clawing at the world in ways she didn't even know she could and between that and the water up to her waist she's done.

And maybe Peggy's done too—which is too terrifying for her brain to really focus on.

She's locked up somewhere on the other side of a door and may be drowning or dead. Angie just wants her **there**. Wants her to mother her and tell her she's being dramatic and maybe hold her. She's got nice warm lips that would press to Angie's temple and even though the last time she saw her she was soaked through she **knows** Peggy'd still smell like powder and a little perfume when she'd take her in her arms.

She'd cry if she wasn't so tired.

God she's such a sad sack.

Here she is with a living legend and a child spy and all she can do is shiver and sniffle and trail after them like the kids would toddle after Natalie.

As if she knows her face is gracing a couple of Angie's thoughts the girl stops walking and turns. "Are you all right," she asks. She looks concerned enough that Angie knows she must be a sight.

And she sounds it enough that Steve stops too. He's got that trussed up HYDRA-lady slung over his shoulder all casual like she's a sack of flour he's getting to a bakery. And he's not the least bit winded—or even phased—by what's happening.

He's also come to this rescue dressed like Captain America. All bright red and white and blue. The Great American Hero the whole country's still in love with a decade later.

She can't possibly compete—Steve is staring real hard at her. "Steely" would be the right word. He hands the unconscious woman over to Natalie and nods in the direction they were headed. Then he wades back to Angie.

"We got to keep moving," he says, and his voice is somehow soft and somehow iron.

She knows they got to keep moving. That's why she's walking towards the "moon pool."

He breathes out through his nose and one side of his mouth quirks up as he looks at her. Then he walks right up to her, spins around, and offers his back.

"I can walk," Angie mumbles.

And it's a bit of a lie because she doesn't really feel like it.

"You sound like me as a kid." He looks over his shoulder at her. "Hop on—it'll be faster."

She tries to push him back and says something about being fine again but Steve shakes his head. "You're not, and it's okay—"

It isn't okay.

'Bout the only thing from the last few days Angie **can** remember—only thing sticking in her head like it's glued there—is the look on Peggy's face as that door slammed shut.

Nothing is okay.

Steve stoops again in front of her and Angie sighs and climbs up onto his back. She's immediately grateful. Even with all the water he's hot like a furnace and puts the heat right back into her bones.

He moves fast too—wordlessly catching up to Natalie without even a gasp and then leading them all to the much discussed "moon pool."

Which is surrounded by lots more guys with guns. Steve leaps back away from the door as bullets spit out of it—pinging the wall opposite like gravel hitting the undercarriage of a car.

He sets Angie down and hefts that big fancy shield of his. From her vantage point—slumped against the bulkhead—the fella has never looked more heroic.

There's a lot of noisy fighting that Angie doesn't dare to watch. Because every time she sees something incredible it's like some other little vital piece of her slips away. She worries that if she looks into that room she'd forget why she was even stuck down under the ocean in the first place.

Instead she focuses on breathing. In and out. It's a good kind of noisy that distracts her from the grunts and cries and bullets and the ring ring ring of phones—

Why the heck is she hearing a phone ring?

She pushes away from the bulkhead and looks around. Listens real good.

Yup. A phone is definitely ringing.

It's on the other side of that open door to the pool thing. A big red phone bolted to a wall.

There's a lot of reasons for a phone like that to ring. Could be HYDRA asking how it's going. Could be important underwater base fellas asking for help with all the flooding.

Could be Peggy and Maria calling out for help.

Angie's gut—which hasn't had a speck a food in it in over twenty-four hours—is like to thinking it's that lattermost one. Mainly on account of needing some bit of hope.

She takes in one of those big fortifying breaths. The kind she does right before going out on stage. It rattles and wheezes in her chest. Gives her as much courage as a shot of whiskey ever could.

Then she lurches past the open door and through the churning water—that's looking a little pinker than she's comfortable with.

And she answers the phone.

####

"Hello?"

Angie's scared. Peggy can hear that in her voice. She's scared, uncertain,

and alive.

Which could soon be more than Peggy can say for herself. The search for more oxygen has been fruitless and now she's stuck just outside the moon pool on a bright red phone she's found bolted to the wall. The water is up past her chest, forcing her to tread water.

She sighs Angie's name.

"Peggy? Peggy where are you?"

There's the unmistakable sound of gunfire and Peggy winces and pulls the phone from her ear. "I'm more concerned about you. Are you all right?"

"Nothing a Great American Hero and a kid spy can't handle. They're taking back something called a moon pool."

Good. Angie's safe…at least safer than Peggy. That's—that's very good.

"When I saw that door shut I thought you and I—"

Peggy has to press her back to the bulkhead to keep from floating away. "I know." She's not sure how to tell her that that could still be the case. The water is rising so quickly and there's no guarantee they can get to her in time.

For a moment there's just the sound of gunfire.

But Angie, Angie's always had a singular gift for **reading** Peggy. For interpreting all her moods and sullen silences. And she does it so neatly now. "Peggy where are you?"

She closes her eyes. Her mouth purses. Tears threaten to burn in her throat. Then she opens her eyes again. Tries to school a voice that's turning shaky because of nothing more than concern. Angie has that gift too. Can break Peggy's heart with a kind question. "I'm at the other moon pool. On the opposite side of the base."

There's still gunfire and the dull roar of the rising water.

"How come I don't hear Maria?"

She turns away from the phone and takes a breath. Smiles even though Angie can't see it. "I sent her to you with the last of the oxygen."

"Peggy—"

"It was my choice." She says it quickly. Thinking that it will be like pulling off bandages or giving more traditional bad news. Just be done with it.

How was Steve able to sound so heroic when he said those exact same words? He was a hero out of the pictures and here Peggy sits sounding, to her own ears, like a coward.

"If one of us is going to take the wretched odds of waiting for help it ought to be one the one who **isn't** going to birth a superhero in the near future."

Angie doesn't say a word. The higher the water the quieter it gets. Until Peggy's breath is bouncing off the water and the walls.

There's a loud boom over the phone. One so large it causes the whole base to rattle. "What was—"

"Tony," Angie sighs. "Just showed up to help take the pool. Why you think it's called that? I can't really see the thing too well from back here, but what I did see didn't look like any moon. Just some hole—"

"Angie—"

"In the ground. Or deck. It's a deck right? Even under water."

"Darling—"

"Will you shut up?"

Peggy does. Angie's told her to shut up plenty of times. But never that way. Never sounding exhausted like that. "You keep talking Peggy, and I get it, you're trying to be noble and brave because sitting over there by that other moon pool all alone has got to be terrifying, but do you have any idea how furious I am with you right now? We were—you and I—" She can hear the enormous breath Angie takes in—even over the phone. The rattle in her chest. The tears Angie will not shed.

Angie can cry at the drop of a hat. But never when it matters. Then she's all still steel.

"I know," she says softly.

"You keep leaving me Peggy."

Her voice doesn't crack but part of Peggy does.

She knows that too.

Peggy remembers what it was like to be on the other end of a call like this. Ten years later and the memory is still clear as the sky in the mountains on a cold night. She remembers everything she and Steve left unsaid that day. Remembers all the opportunities she watched slip through her fingers in the blink of an eye. Remembers—"I love you."

"Really?" Angie sounds so tired.

"Really." To her own ear Peggy sounds tired too.

There's a little spat of silence and rustling and voices she can't quite make out—then, "Steve and Tony just went for a swim. Think they're looking for you."

"You told them?"

"All those years at the automat? Gotta be a great multitasked."

"You were there for two…"

Peggy's having to tread water to keep her head above it now, and it seems to be coming faster. Roaring through some hole in the bulkhead she can't see.

She looks for the bright side, "Steve was always a fast swimmer—"

"And that kid of Maria's got jets strapped to his feet."

"Bit ostentatious if you ask me."

"It's that color that does me in. Red and gold is just a little too flashy you know?"

"This from the woman who owns at least a dozen rhinestone-festooned gowns."

"But I'm not fightin' crime in them."

Angie's so insistent Peggy smiles. "No. You aren't."

The silence on the line cracks and pops. "How high's the water now?"

She has to spit out some of it lapping at her mouth. "Higher than I'm comfortable with."

More silence. But it feels easy. Like the long phone calls Angie would waste all her money on when she was stuck in Hollywood and Peggy was back in DC.

Angie breaks it—as she often does. Peggy has always been more content with silence then she has. "Natalie's tying up our new pal Hydra so it's just you and me English. Tell me you love me again."

Peggy does. It's easy.

That's the thing. The acute difference between Steve and Angie. With Steve it was never right. Ships passing and all that muck. The words she'd wanted to say never seemed to fall out of her mouth as she needed them to. They'd stop just short and the two of them were always left on this—this precipice.

With Angie…with Angie it's simple. The words flow as fast as the water that's sure to drown her. They're two women in careers that can't afford their "proclivities" and yet Peggy can muster the strength to tell Angie she loves her a hundred times a day.

A thousand.

She and Steve are forever trapped on the precipice, but she and Angie seem to have no problem diving right over.

"I don't tell you that enough."

"Sure you do."

"Not lately."

"No. Not lately." A watery laugh. "You've been a real pill lately English."

"Angie—"

"And now… You don't get to die okay? Because then you don't get to spend the next fifty years making it all up to me. And you've got a lot to make up for."

"Angie could you just—" The water's pushing higher and the phone's cord has gone taunt. Soon the mouth piece will be covered and—

"I love you too Peggy. Like sun on the grass and wind in the leaves and tomorrows—"

"That never die."

That silly silly film of hers.

The water slips over the bottom of the mouthpiece and just before the phone shorts out she hears sputtering and cries that Steve is back with Maria.

Angie's begging her to just stay alive and hold out for rescue.

But Peggy's rather certain it's just a touch too late.

####

Peggy dies.

When Tony makes it back with her bedraggled body in her arms she is **dead**. Angie's hands, cold and wet, fly to her mouth and she turns into one of those awful…**girls**. She helped hold her brother down when a man cut off his leg and she watched her cousin die but this—this is what turns her into something silly and simpering.

The only thing keeping her from going into full on dramatics is that she's got an audience.

Tony sets Peggy down gently in the water and the mask on his helmet lifts up and he looks as beat as Angie feels. "I tried…"

The excuse dies. Goes as dead as the woman floating in the water. Her lips are blue and her skin's like wax. She looks like the folks they lay out at the funeral parlor.

Angie starts towards her, but Steve is there first. He shakes Peggy. The meat of his hand slams into her chest. He starts mumbling—ranting—about how they just need to get some air into her. Get her circulation going.

Tony reaches out to tell him to stop and Steve shrugs his hand away. Bends. Breathes air into Peggy's lungs.

As regret goes this is the one that will linger for Angie. Because she just goes and lets this other fellow save Peggy's life. Sure she holds her chilled hand and watches. She's there when they all climb into the tube ("Submarine," Maria insists.) and Tony uses his fancy rocket boots to get them back up to the surface. And her hand strokes Peggy's sopping hair while Steve pumps air into her with those big super soldier lungs.

But when they hit the sunlight and Peggy coughs up a gallon of seawater and clutches at Angie like she's a life preserver it's still Steve who did the saving.

Angie was just…for once in her life…Angie was just the observer.

It rankles her for the rest of the day—which is spent on a stolen HYDRA boat.

Angie's pouting—and there's no other word for it—is impressive according to Peggy. "**I** was the one that nearly died," she notes from the cot she's resting on. Steve's swaddled her in half the blankets on the ship and left her looking like a poorly made stuffed pasta shell.

"But I should have helped," Angie admits. She hates saying it out loud—even if she knows it's got to be said.

Peggy shivers and then sniffles, "You're an actress Angie, not some superhero. You can't be expected to—"

Angie hops up and turns away and hates that she's so steaming' mad about it. Hates that she's turning into an infant over it. Just in general hates herself.

"You know," Peggy's voice is a little softer, "being a superhero isn't a metric I really judge my lovers by."

She wants to point out that Steve **is** a superhero and Peggy **does** love him, and an Oscar-winning actress who can karate chop a fella doesn't really compare to America's greatest hero.

"And it isn't why I loved him. Steve did—does—the right thing."

Angie sags. And Peggy's lousy use of tense isn't lost on her. She can, on occasion, **notice** things.

Peggy calls her name and she, finally, has to reluctantly turn and peek at her with downcast eyes, "And you do too, Angie. Or do you forget the time you took on the mob to save me from my pimp."

She rolls her eyes. Peggy's never gonna let her live **that** down. "But I'm still no Steve Rogers."

"Something well established the first time we slept together." It's supposed to be a joke, and because Angie remembers that one long night fondly she **does** have to smile. Which just turns Peggy's own gentle smile into one of her full wattage ones. Only then the woman—the idiot—has to keep talking. Because clearly Peggy is seeing herself as some kind of noble sort of warrior woman in this whole scenario and hasn't actually considered the really stupid words that fall out of that perfect mouth. "You're easy Angie Martinelli. And that something Steve can never be."

Angie could go real emotional at that line. Could be, or even just act, heartbroken. But she's known Peggy Carter for nearly a decade so she purses her lips and stares at her until Peggy's as red as her favorite shade of lipstick.

"That came out—I mean—"

"You know it isn't nice to leave a girl frettin' about her place in your life and then go and call her **easy** English. Pretty tacky in fact."

"I didn't mean—I mean technically it's true but that's—what on earth are you doing."

Angie's miming shoveling dirt, "Just helping you dig that hole you're so intent on climbing into."

"I mean it's easy to have a relationship with you!" She pauses. "When you're not being an utter tit and mocking me or forcing me into the arms of my ex."

"You went!"

"And you didn't even fight! Not once. Steve Rogers showed up and you rolled over faster than the White Sox!"

"What'd you expect me to do. You keep his damn portraits on every wall in the house and were about losing your mind just thinking you saw him. You had to talk to him."

"Right. Talk. Which I wanted to do. But then you were just—" She looks like a real ass sitting there pretending to shove someone. "Right into his arms! Even Howard didn't root as hard for us." Damning words judging by the short story Howard got published in a Captain America fan magazine.

Angie wants to rub at her eye like she used to as a child. She's still exhausted and if she wasn't fighting with Peg she'd probably be curled up in a corner asleep. But she doesn't rub her eye.

Peggy's swung her legs over the side of her cot while Angie was thinking about her own exhaustion and is now coming towards her slowly on bare feet and reminding her too much of a trainer at the circus dealing with the lions.

"The thing is," Peggy starts, "Steve is the love of my life in a way no one can compare to." Ouch. "And I'm always going to love him, but…anything more than that is hard, and love isn't meant to be hard Angie. It's meant to be good and easy and not leave a woman feeling like her heart's been ripped out."

"There we're in agreement," she says quietly, and she's real good about holding back the tears burning behind her eyes and in her throat.

Peggy reaches out with a cool hand and her thumb presses to Angie's cheek. Forces her to look hard at her and only her. "Loving you is one of the easiest things I've ever done." She steps in close and she's all smelling like sweat and old salt water and it's maybe the best smell to ever grace Angie's nostrils. The kind of smell she'd bottle up and spritz on her pillow before bed. Because after she steps close she lays a gentle kiss on Angie's lips and her thumb keeps on stroking her cheek and it is that.

It is easy.

Just like breathing.

Her hand holds Peggy's in place and she keeps on kissing her with the kind of ease usually reserved for just getting out of bed in the morning or squeezing the kids in her arms.

"When I'm with you," Peggy whispers against her lips, "it doesn't hurt."

####

Watching the woman you love with someone else. Watching them **choose** someone else. Even after you've travelled back in time. It leaves Steve feeling gutted in the kind of way he hasn't felt since he woke up seventy years in the future.

Peggy would never tell him no to his face. She's too kind—too good. He even heard her say she loved him.

But she's chosen someone else and Steve has to respect it. He won't ruin what they have just because he wants it too.

So he leaves the other blankets he'd found outside the room Peggy and Angie are standing in and he goes out on the deck and leans against the railing and tries to catch his breath.

Breathing hasn't been a problem since Erskine changed him. But now there's the all too familiar thump of his heart against his ribcage and the burn of not enough oxygen in his lungs.

Steve's hands find the railing and he squeezes. Hard enough that the metal dents between his fingers.

He's happy for Peggy. Profoundly happy.

All he's ever wanted is for her to be okay.

But the jealousy bubbling up in him is ugly and terrible—

Stark sidles up next to him. Offers the bottle of vodka he's "rescued" from the mess. Steve declines with a tilt of his head. So Stark takes a swing and stares out at the water.

They're racing back to shore now with a teenage assassin at the helm of the boat. The future Mrs. Stark is sitting close to the bow of the ship watching the water quietly and hugging close the blanket wrapped around her.

"I always thought that one of the best ways to move on from an old girlfriend is to see how **they've** moved on."

Steve thinks with everything he's heard about Tony Stark the guy's never had cause to **need** to move on from a woman. But he can also recognize what Stark is trying to say—and what he's implied. "You wanted me to see them together."

"I **wanted** to capture crazy HYDRA lady before she rewrote time. You seeing my fave godmothers was just a bonus."

Knowing that Stark is supposed to be a "friend" just makes it worse. "Why," he asks through gritted teeth.

"Because you spend more time visiting her than her own relatives do."

When he whips around to glare at Stark he's met with an even gaze that almost has him taking a step back. Tony nods, "Yeah. He who pays the bills gets to see the visitation records Rogers. They should call you Casper for the way you haunt that place."

He really doesn't want to get a lecture on becoming a ghost. Peggy's already given him a couple to that effect in the present. As has Nat.

And Sam.

"Have you ever **actually** had to move on?"

Stark shrugs. "Not yet. But I've seen people do it." His eyes fall on the hold. "And I've seen people who don't." Then they drift over to where his once and future mother is watching the water. "Imagine it's pretty rough."

It's worse than all the radiation and drugs and needles combined.

"It's not pleasant," he agrees.

That's enough for Stark. He slaps Steve on the back like they're old buddies and then jogs over to squat next to his mother and talk. He's a different man then. Being with his mother, resurrected even for a little while, takes years off Tony's face.

Maria just looks confused and peers at her son as if he were an engine to be dismantled. Then her hand reaches out to cup his cheek and her whole face softens and Steve doesn't want to feel sorry for himself any more than he already does, but he has to.

The jealousy—the hurt—just wells up inside of him.

He goes back inside and finds a bunk to lay down in and sleeps fitfully.

There it doesn't hurt quite as much.

####

When Steve comes to later it's because someone's watching him. It's a unique kind of sensation that always had the Commandos teasing him about getting super senses along with all that strength. Steve just figures he's more attuned to his surroundings then he used to be.

He debates whether to keep pretending to sleep and figure out **who** is doing the watching, but then they come closer and sit on the cot beside him and their hand runs though his hair and their lips brush his ear and Peggy says "You're a terrible actor Steve Rogers."

He cracks an eyelid and is rewarded with Peggy being up close and personal. She's even got that crooked grin that has him turning into a kid.

He smiles too—it's the self deprecating one Sam says is "charming." "Never had complaints with the USO."

Her fingers fiddle with the zipper on his suit. "USO never had to watch you fake sleep. I half expected a snore."

"I'm too good for that."

"Perhaps."

A silence that isn't the least bit easy swells between them. Peggy's fingers have moved onto running across seams of Steve's suit and his hand lightly brushes the bit of her he can reach. They don't talk.

Until Peggy opens her mouth to say Steve's name and it's the tone doctors use when relaying bad news.

So Steve reaches up to stay her hand against his chest and says, "I know."

"I don't—"

"I saw you and Angie together."

"Oh."

"She makes you happy."

That. That's a relief for Peggy to hear. He sees all the tension he hadn't realized she was carrying just evaporate. "She does."

"And she's not a popsicle waiting to thaw—"

"You don't have to be either." It's a gesture. Kind and too serious. Urgent.

Steve shakes his head, "Yeah, I do. In 2011 they're gonna need a Captain America who hasn't had a couple of hip replacements."

"And what about us. Nothing awful happens between now and 2011?"

He's not going to argue the point. Peggy already knows he can't stay. Told him herself. Time's a delicate thing and the two of them can't just unravel it because of what might have been.

She pulls her hand away. Curls it up in her lap. "It's knowing you're out there that's the worst part. Knowing that if I just look—" She takes a deep breath even while Steve holds his, "If I just looked…harder."

"You didn't know in '45—"

"But I know now. I know that you're out there and I can't do anything but let nature take it's course. You and I are meant to change the world Steve, and here I am permitting—enduring—a status quo."

"**You** change the world."

She laughs. "I was going to say you can't know that, but—"

"But I do." They share a smile like they used to. "Things in 2015 aren't perfect Peggy, but they're better."

"Women president then?"

"No. But there's been a black man as president. And a Catholic."

"Angie will be thrilled."

They laugh and the laughter turns to a chuckle and the chuckle drifts into silence and then they're left with nothing but the loud drone of the ship.

Steve cocks his head. "Engines sound a little loud."

"Because they're not engines. At least as you and I think of them. Tony and Maria, with Hydra's reluctant help, have crafted some sort of device—"

"To take us back."

Peggy nods.

"You were waking me up to send me home."

"I wanted to say goodbye. Properly and—" She's lost and apologetic and if this is the last time they're gonna be alone Steve needs it to count.

He pushes himself up and kisses he. It's the last time after all. Right? She must agree because her her hands fall on his face and hold him there and they don't move until one of his hand's finds her shoulder and the other finds her waist.

He has to wonder what it's like for Peggy to kiss Angie, because she's made it very clear that love is meant to be easy and there's nothing easier than this kiss. Nothing more right.

"Is it too late to say I want to stay." He's breathing against her lips like he's got asthma again.

Peggy's fingers drag through his hair and her nails scratch his scalp and she trails kisses up his cheek, to that space beneath his eye, and finally to his brow. "Yes."

Her forehead replaces her lips and they're both quiet. "Promise me," she says, and there's hitch in her voice she has to swallow away. "Promise me you'll find someone."

"I can't—"

Her hands fall from his hair and come to rest on his shoulders. "Consider it an order captain."

"Thought I outranked you?"

She ignores the joke. "A good woman or man. Someone that makes—"

"No one else will—"

"Someone will Steve, and I can't wait for you to visit and tell me all about them."

####

Peggy holds his hand all the way down to the lower decks of the ship. It never gets sweaty or uncomfortable and he stares at the way their hands intertwine and hopes that his eidetic memory (another gift of Erskine's) doesn't fail him. Not when it comes to this.

He's so busy marveling at how their hands fit together that he doesn't pay attention to what Peggy says. Doesn't listen to her story about the precious stone—gem—that Hydra had on her and that will allow the time travel.

At least until they get to the engine room and he's struck by the familiar, ethereal, light growing at the center of the room.

Peggy grumbles a "bloody hell" and darts into the room barking orders at Stark and his mother—who both look pleased with the ball of light they've formed at the center of the ship.

Steve marvels at the light—at how perfectly identical it was to the light that brought them here. It even **feels** the same

He marvels and doesn't spy Angie until she's stepping out of the shadows beside him. Somehow in the course of a few days she's become as quiet as Peggy or Nat. "And I thought stage lights were bright," she says. The light reflects in her eyes. Makes them seem empty.

"Nothing compared to the light of interdimensional…time…whatever."

Her hands fall on her hips and she strikes a pose out of the funny pages. Stares at the light. But he can see her eyes flicker to him. "Steve," she starts, and he braces himself for some line about Peggy, "much as I gather I'm not there in the future."

It's not what he expected to hear. He can't find the right words to respond.

"And I figure there's a couple of reasons that could be."

"Angie I really can't—"

She forges on, "All I gotta know is if I'm dead and buried or if I'm…something else."

He thinks of the way she attacked him down in the base. How efficient and methodical and brutal and **fast** she was.

And when he looks at her—looks beyond that face that's so familiar from clocks and plates in the mall next to Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball—he sees she's terrified.

So he tells her the truth as best he knows it. None of the details. She doesn't need to know she dies driving too fast on a road she should have known. Doesn't need to know about all the people who mourned her. The people who insist she never died. Those that lionize and those who demonize Hollywood's last hellion. He just tells her she passed and that she's remembered.

####

Angie watches them all leap through the portal. Tony Stark with that green haired bitch in his arms, and Steve Rogers. Who gives Peggy a searing look before he leaps up into the air and does a fancy flip into the light.

Maria shuts it off after that and with that whole dimensional-whats-it gone the ship is dead quiet.

Until Maria sighs. "The only thing I don't get is how I'm supposed to love Howard Stark enough to want to have a baby with him."

"I believe this is one of those moments where you're preaching to the choir," Peggy says dryly.

They're headed upstairs afterwards, Maria holding the fancy magic gem thing carefully in her hands, which are covered in giant gloves like a welder uses, when Peggy light touches Angie's arm.

"Are you all right," she asks, and her brow's furrowed as she watches Angie closely.

"Sure, why wouldn't I be?"

"I don't know what Steve told you before he left, but at the time you looked…disturbed."

Angie frowns. And she wants to ask "When did Steve tell me what," but she gets the feeling that's not something she should say. Peggy would get worried and then there'd be long bouts sitting in a hospital and all Angie really wants to do is get back to dry land and work and the life time traveling ex-boyfriends nearly wrecked.

So she gives Peggy a careful smile, and says "It was nothing important. Just posturing."

She doesn't know if that's true. Everything from the last few minutes is a little fuzzy. Everything but that flip Steve did.

That's burned into her brain a lot sharper than it ought to be.

"Come on," she says, "we gotta get back. I missed a couple of shows already and don't need more tacked onto my contract."

Peggy's alarmed, "You were just abducted. Surely these are extenuating circumstances?"

"For you and me maybe, but not for most entertainment types. They can be real taskmasters."

They both honest to god chuckle. Which isn't so odd for Angie, but is a helluva thing for Peggy. Then they go upstairs and sit out on the bow of the ship and canoodle like teenagers and when they get back to the land of the living they part ways with Natalie, who promises she'll stop by sometime soon before she gives Angie a hug and a very serious look.

Peers at Angie like she's made of science.

They get Maria home too. Send her back to LA with Peggy teasing her the whole way to the airport about her future husband.

"Please don't tell him," Maria begs, and Peggy agrees and Angie crosses her heart.

Then it's just the two of them. As it ought to be. Naked and a little damp in bed that night.

"He was really just posturing," Peggy asks. Her hands are running through Angie's hair and untangling knots that just aren't there.

"Sure," Angie says. Even if it's a lie. "Why?"

Peggy's all quiet. "I don't know…half of me thought…he couldn't tell me where he was, but I thought he might tell you."

The worst bit is

He might have.

"He didn't." That lie's as easy as the last one.

"Course not. Steve Rogers is too noble for his own good."

"What about you? Now that you know I mean."

Peggy's hand stills. "Part of me doesn't want to rest until we find him."

"Big part?"

"Enormous," she says with a smile. "But there's another part of me that knows…that knows that isn't my life." She slips away and straddles Angie. Kisses her again and again. "**This** is my life. And I won't have it any other way."

THE END

####

**AUTHOR'S NOTE**: This particular Cartinelli saga will continue next in Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow. Until then you can check out the rad comic I'm doing with romanimp, Cold War Crush. Or you can follow my Swan Queen trash, Dangerous is the Vexed God.

Be sure to follow me here or on Tumblr for Cartinelli one-shots in the same universe.

Oh yeah. AND HERE IS A VERY IMPORTANT STINGER JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIES.

####

Things are chaotic back in 2015. Steve and Tony stumble into a warzone. One where Sam is nursing a dislocated shoulder and a broken wing and Nat's going toe to toe with the soldier Hydra had employed.

"Call them off," Steve growls, and Hydra huffs before she says something in sing song German. The soldier pauses. Stutters like choppy video on a bad connection. They take in all the people in the room and then they dash out.

"That's one way to end a fight," Tony remarks.

And Steve would be inclined to agree, but he's busy watching Nat, who's looking after the mercenary like she's seen a ghost.

She refuses to talk about it. Which isn't new. And if she remembers that time she was a teenager and fought side by side with him against HYDRA she doesn't mention that either.

Though she does glower when Tony makes a crack about her age.

After they make it home, apocalypse successfully averted and Viper nee Madame Hydra firmly in custody, Steve does what he always does when he needs to quiet his mind.

He hops on his bike and heads over to Peggy's.

She's asleep when he gets there and her breathing is a haunting wheeze.

Carefully, mindful of how delicate she is, he laces his fingers with hers. It's a gross mimicry of what's seared into his memory. Where once she was smooth and strong and warm now she's thin as tissue and frail and cool. So cool.

His thumb grazes over her hand and he glances up at the photos she keeps near. They make more sense now.

There's Angie again and again and again. Only it's Angie: the woman Peggy chose, not Angela: the actress Steve knows. He sees Maria now too. A little older and maybe a little sadder. The gum cracking kid he'd met all smoothed away.

Then he sees the photo of the three of them and Howard with a baby.

To be honest he'd never considered it before. He's always assumed it was Peggy's child. Or Angie's.

But now. Now he knows he's looking at a photo of Tony Stark as an infant. And while that is amusing it's also deeply deeply disturbing.

Because that means the photo was taken in the 70s. And it's there in Howard and Maria's faces.

But Peggy and Angie.

The two of them haven't aged a day since 1955.


End file.
